Captured

Ottawa — once a frontier logging town and since 1857 the capital of what would become Canada — is not London, and the intricacies of the Canadian psyche are not those of the imperial British twilight. It is a challenge, given the thin and fragmented culture of this country, spread over a vast space and afflicted with intense, often intentional historical amnesia, to write a political thriller with the sophisticated richness and layered complexity of a John le Carré novel, the gloomy intricacies of Philip Kerr’s Nazi and Cold War Berlin, or the infinitely shady doings of Europe drifting inexorably into the Second World War as portrayed by Alan Furst. Historical amnesia is a great simplifier. We Canadians do not, as individuals, share enough collective memory to fuel, beyond the precincts of political junkies and the political class, a richly layered political narrative. Multiple ironies and allusions are lost if there is nothing there — or remembered — to allude...