Ottawa: A Literary Portrait

Peter Roberts is the former Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Here is a valuable book, an interesting book, a book full of surprises.
But it is excessively modest. It may have missed a chance to be
something more than it is.

Following Sandra Gwyn’s graceful foreword and John Bell’s somewhat
leaden introduction, there are 31, pieces including poetry, short
fiction, travel literature, and memoirs—all of them about Ottawa. The
editor’s intention, he tells us, was to present a snapshot of Ottawa
as seen by non-Ottawans over the past 150 years or so. This plan
succeeds with the earlier writers, who were visitors to the city. Pieces
by recent and contemporary authors, however, tend to be set in Ottawa
because the authors happened to live there.

There are surprises galore. Who’s ever heard of W.H.G. Kingston? Yet
in 1853 he visited Ottawa and wrote elegantly about it. Who knew that
Anthony Trollope came to our capital and wrote about it? In a passage
from the memoirs of his aide-de-camp is new material about Lord
Tweedsmuir, John Buchan. And it came as a surprise to this reviewer to
find that in 1945 an author called Robert Fontaine wrote a very funny
short story (part of a novel) about an Ottawa-versus-Hull baseball game.

All the same, there is a whiff of small-town history in this anthology.
One senses that the editor had in mind a readership of good folk living
in Sandy Hill and other leafy parts of old Ottawa. But Ottawa is not
Medicine Hat or Ste.-Anne-de-la-Pocathiere. It is the capital of a big
country, the scene of major events that touch millions of lives, an
important city that bestrides the two solitudes. This book should be
bigger, longer, and aimed squarely at the whole country.