Their Long Liaison

Historical fiction imagines how the past might have unfolded under slightly different circumstances. Within such what‑if scenarios, catastrophe might have been averted; minor characters could have become heroes. For obvious reasons, the Second World War casts a long shadow over the genre. The Dunkirk evacuation, the Blitz, the D‑Day landings, and other phases of the conflict have generated countless novels, and there are few signs that the war, despite having ended eight decades ago, has yielded all its secrets, real or invented.

John Delacourt’s The Innocent Canadian enters the crowded field of war thrillers with a plot about support for fascism among the upper classes in England. In 1941, a well-connected aristocrat named Longwood exerts his influence to keep the Americans out of the war. He hobnobs with the Mitford sisters, Chips Channon, and other known Nazi sympathizers. Having a “dodgy past” and an insider’s knowledge of eastern Europe, Longwood wants to plant a double agent, Joseph Orlovsky, in British Security Coordination, an intelligence-gathering unit in New York City. In reality, this covert operation was guided by Manitoba-born William Stephenson, better known by his code name, “Intrepid.” Thus fictional characters (Longwood, Orlovsky) consort with actual people (Channon, Stephenson) to create a counterfactual narrative about treason.

The story follows Colette Cluny, a sophisticated writer who worked at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, reported on the Spanish Civil War, and lived for two years in Los Angeles with her husband, Padraig, an actor. At a party in wartime London, Cluny meets Bill Davenant, who hails from Nova Scotia and works under Lester B. Pearson at Canada House. Davenant is dazzled to learn that Cluny wrote The Billet in Paris, which some people dismiss as “a woman’s novel” but which he praises as “a work of art.” Cluny and Davenant fall in love, even as they collaborate on exposing Longwood’s plans to promote Nazi interests in Britain.

As Delacourt explains in the acknowledgments, Cluny and Davenant are modelled on Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist, and Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat posted to London during the war. Bowen and Ritchie met at a christening in February 1941. At the time, Ritchie, a man about town, was involved with a dancer. Bowen was companionably married to a veteran of the First World War. Marriage between Bowen and Ritchie was never an option. When Bowen’s husband died in 1952, Ritchie had already wed his cousin.

A discreet version of the Bowen-Ritchie liaison appears in three volumes of Ritchie’s published diaries: The Siren Years, Diplomatic Passport, and Storm Signals. In those carefully edited pages, he seldom mentions his wife yet constantly refers to Bowen. While attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1946, he recounted the sensitive relationship with diplomatic suavity. “Elizabeth Bowen is here,” he wrote. “We meet every day in the fenced-off area of the gravelled terrace outside the Palais du Luxembourg, where the press are permitted to mingle with the diplomats.” Although she reported on the conference for the Cork Examiner, her real reason for being in Paris was to see Ritchie. Over the years, Ritchie rose through the echelons of Canadian diplomacy. Whenever possible, Bowen arranged her schedule to visit him. Theirs was an affair of long separations and intermittent meetings. Faithful to the end, Ritchie was at Bowen’s bedside in the weeks before she died in February 1973.

Bowen and Ritchie’s romance jump-starts the plot of The Innocent Canadian. Bowen worked for the Ministry of Information during the war, as does Colette Cluny. Bowen travelled to Ireland to report on attitudes toward Britain; Cluny loses her job with the government for purloining classified files and moves to Ireland for the sake of her writing. Delacourt borrows from Bowen’s fiction as well as her life. The opening chapter of The Heat of the Day takes place during a concert in Regent’s Park on the first Sunday in September 1942; the first chapter of Delacourt’s novel takes place during a concert in Regent’s Park on the last Sunday in September 1941. As the story progresses, Cluny takes on a life of her own while parallels with Bowen recede.

This is a book about writers. Despite his diplomatic career, Davenant has literary ambitions, which he partly satisfies by keeping a diary. Even in the middle of a conversation, he wonders how to sum up his experience in words. “Yes, must write it down,” he thinks as he talks to Cluny about whether the United States will enter the war. Davenant’s enemies see his frustrated ambition so clearly they call him “Killigrew,” after a British playwright in the court of Charles II, now considered a “minor writer, generally viewed as an incompetent.” Yet history has vindicated the diarist: Ritchie’s published journals are one of the richest sources of information about international relations and diplomatic ambition that any Canadian has ever produced.

The Innocent Canadian flaunts its bookish credentials. Davenant thinks about “big shouldered cities like Chicago,” a reference to a Carl Sandburg poem. If you think you recognize the opening lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the description of a character as “plump but not quite stately,” you would not be wrong. Spy fiction provides some flourishes as well. Robbie Findlay, a bespectacled spymaster who resembles a “large nocturnal animal,” shares traits with George Smiley.

For all its literariness, Delacourt’s latest contains many errors. Colette Cluny likes to write because it gives her “piece of mind.” Davenant prides himself “on how wordly he was.” Pronouns occasionally go awry, too. Tidying up syntax would clarify meaning, even when the point of a sentence is how characters size each other up: “Davenant could only say ‘I see,’ as he was weighing the probability of Longwood being aware of how much Davenant knew of Longwood’s involvement in Orlovsky’s escape.” A brisk proofreading could have eliminated such mistakes.

History may be crowded with bit players, but in fiction too many minor characters cause confusion. Cluny has a long conversation with a newspaperman, Freddie Norton, who then disappears from the storyline. Like an extra allowed just one brief onstage moment, Cluny’s son, Charlie, vomits on a boat but has no speaking part. Countless figures cross paths with Davenant or Cluny before bowing out of the action. For the most part, they provide information that helps the two lovers prove Longwood’s treachery. Some exist merely to die. Alexandra Orlovsky speaks to a man in Regent’s Park; shortly thereafter her body is dredged from the Thames. Dermot Keogh, a gay photographer, recounts colourful anecdotes about his sexual exploits, then gets stabbed. A thug named Mahoney tries to kill Davenant and Cluny by ramming their car. You can guess what happens to him.

The Innocent Canadian ends with a separation rather than a death. Davenant, having broken diplomatic protocol, is sent to New York as if he has been put on probation. Cluny, in Dublin, resolves to write a novel about love and war. Perhaps a working title for her book could be The Siren Years, if not The Heat of the Day