Maclean

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Maclean is a remarkable novel, small in size, profound in perception,
skilful in execution. It must have been fascinating to sit in a
University of New Brunswick English lit class and (if you were lucky)
hear Professor Allan Donaldson discuss the poetry of World War I, read
Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Canada’s own John
McRae. There are echoes here of Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Ghost
Road.

Donaldson’s protagonist, veteran John Maclean, sits at a war memorial
in the early morning hours and thinks, “maybe none of them had ever
come home. Maybe only their ghosts had come home, as some poet had said.
Maybe one way or another, quick or slow, they had all died of their
wounds. And maybe that wasn’t so different, after all, from the way
life happened for everybody. Maybe the whole thing was a war, leaving
behind its trail of dead and wounded, its trail of sad ghosts haunting
the ruins of their lives.” In his own life, Maclean considers, “it
had happened a lot quicker than in what they call peace, condensing into
a few months what otherwise took decades, but peace or war, it happened
all the same.” Donaldson takes the reader through a day in Maclean’s
life in a small New Brunswick town in 1943, a day beginning with his
efforts to drum up enough money to buy his mother a birthday present,
and ending with his silent soliloquy at the foot of the cenotaph. Much
of his life has devolved into flashbacks of the war; his search for a
few dollars becomes a quest for a link between his present life and the
ghosts haunting him from the past.

Donaldson is also the author of a book of short stories, Paradise
Siding (1984).