Here Be Dragons

It is an unfortunate fashion among book editors these days to encourage their non-fiction authors to showcase the most dramatic material first. The intent is to hook the reader into reading more, as if having paid for the book weren’t incentive enough. But the result is more like throwing us into the deep end to flap around in ignorance and irritation about what the hell is going on. Who are these people, how did they get here, what’s their significance? By the time we reach the answers in chronological order, we must go back to reread the opening to make sense of it.

Thus, Where to from Here begins at the end. The scene: Ottawa, August 17, 2020. The actors: Bill Morneau, Canada’s minister of finance, and Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, alone at last, mano-a-mano. The plot: Morneau has come to tender his resignation. And we, the readers, are invited to be in the room where it happened. Except nothing happens. Or, rather, what happens is so underwhelming...