All Is Not Vanity

Ward McBurney is a Toronto writer best known for the series of stories he read on CBC Radio’s Fresh Air from 1997 to 2007. In 2001, Dundurn published a collection of these radio stories under the title Sky Train, which sold modestly. When McBurney proposed a follow-up volume, Dundurn politely declined, citing poor sales. Undeterred, he published Wave Hands himself.

Around this time, McBurney began working on an ambitious novel about World War One and its aftermath: & After This Our Exile. When the book was done, Ward asked me to read it. I happily obliged. (McBurney is a former student of mine whose literary career I had been following with interest.)

The novel centres on several members of a fictional battalion drawn from the ranks of Toronto typesetters. It is set both in the trenches of France and in Toronto in 1934, during the great Canadian Corps reunion. And it contains some of the finest writing about...