Charles Montgomery has several notable family connections: a field marshal great-uncle of World War II fame and an ecclesiastical great-grandfather well known for his missionary work in the South Pacific. Montgomery’s own father dies just after the son has turned ten. Among his father’s possessions in the family’s Vancouver Island farmhouse is a frayed book, The Light of Melanesia, written by their evangelizing ancestor. With its faded photos of South Pacific villages and native inhabitants, the heirloom mesmerizes the young boy. When he returns to it as an adult, Montgomery finds his fascination newly mixed with doubts about the religious zeal that spurred its exploits.
His ambivalence causes him to travel to the South Pacific in 2002 to search for surviving remnants of the pagan worship his forebear had fought against. “What had become of the archipelago my great-grandfather set out to transform?” Montgomery wonders in The Last Heathen: Encounters...
Mark Lovewell has held various senior roles at Ryerson University. He is also one of the magazine’s contributing editors.
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