Still a Mystery

The idea of assembling, ordering, comparing and analyzing all the works, fictional and supposedly nonfictional, that have spun out of the Tom Thomson legend over the years is intriguing and welcome. In one volume you can now find a description and commentary of all the plays, films, novels, musicals, biographies, poems, essays, catalogues and other forms of tribute paid to Thomson’s memory. Eleven pages of bibliography guide you to whatever you want to explore.

Thomson died just before his 40th birthday in 1917, when thousands of younger Canadians of promise were being killed in World War I. How did Thomson’s death, so far from those awful trenches of France and Belgium, in peaceful, idyllic Algonquin Park, manage to ignite such fervent reverence instead of theirs? How did the memory of him survive the erosion of time and make his legend more resonant nearly a century later?

Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald recognized something compelling, if withdrawn...