Of Music and Espionage

Since Michael Ondaatje’s 1976 novel, Coming Through Slaughter, and Timothy Findley’s 1977 work, The Wars, historical fiction in Canada has no longer been considered a species of genre writing. Following the publication of those two works in particular, many historical novels are counted among the best of literary fiction. More recently Guy Vanderhaeghe, Emma Donoghue, Joseph Boyden, Annabel Lyon, Lawrence Hill, Jane Urquhart, Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry and Margaret Sweatman, among others, have explored historical subjects ranging from ancient Greece to the Cold War.

Herb Wyile, in his 2006 book, Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction, states that “for Canadian writers at the turn of the twenty-first century, history has indisputably become a central preoccupation.” In a sure sign of literary maturation, these historical...