A Living Past and a Complex Present

"Can we agree, the past is not dead but the present is its surprising and complex flower?" posits Felix d'Amboisee in the quotation that opens Bill Gaston's latest novel. Proving d’Amboisee’s dual proposition is the tall order that novelist Gaston seeks to fill in The Order of Good Cheer, by alternating narratives of two Canadian coastal settlements, separated by 400 years and several thousand kilometres of continent.

In the French Habitation at Port Royal in 1607, Samuel de Champlain and 45 other white men struggle to plant the fleur-de-lis in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Basin. It is a garden made inhospitable by inclement weather, devouring mosquitoes, shifting politics, questionable cuisine, inscrutable natives and the ravages of “the scurve,” for which there is no certain remedy.

In 2007, on Canada’s opposite shore, an amiable underachiever named Andy Winslow is content to read accounts of Champlain’s far-flung adventures from the safe remove of...