Robin Roger

Between 1971 and 1981, 15,000 Jews left Montreal. Since then the population has declined by another 10,000. Relocation is a major adjustment, even between cities in the same country, so it is unlikely that the loss of Montreal as an inspiration and setting for Canadian Jewish fiction was a prominent concern while people dismantled and rebuilt their…

In her eighth novel, The Night Stages, Jane Urquhart revisits and elaborates themes familiar to readers from such earlier works as The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers. Anchored by the story of the creation of a monumental work of art, as well as the aesthetic and sentimental apprenticeship of the…

Novelists have often used public figures as models for their characters, sometimes thinly veiled, other times more disguised. The record-holding model in literature is probably Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was caricatured, often unkindly and unfairly, by D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and Alan Bennett, among others. Although she managed to withstand her unflattering caricatures with…

Deep compassion is not the normal reaction to Garth Drabinsky, but I found his comments about prison isolation genuinely moving. “It was devastating,” he said of his experience in Beaver Creek Institution. “I hadn’t experienced anything like that since I was three years old when I was moved to isolation and quarantine when I first had polio … Every time that door slammed shut … I was overwhelmed.” It is not the anguish of his current isolation that Drabinsky…

Why Men Lie, the final book in the Cape Breton Trilogy, draws Linden MacIntyre’s exploration of trauma and its reverberations to a close. Through chronicling the vicissitudes of two generations of the Gillis and MacAskil families, MacIntyre depicts an array of grim misfortunes ranging from the simple to the complex: blunt sudden…