Lonesome Hero

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta. He is co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, author of The Salvation Army and
the Public, and editor of “Improved by Cult

Lonesome Hero is a novel immersed—and now seemingly stuck—in the
1970s. This reprint, the first since the novel’s appearance in 1974,
certainly has some nostalgic appeal and helps us see just how far
Stenson has come as a writer, but it somehow fails to make us laugh as
much at or empathize as fully with its self-centred anti-hero as it did
then. Like Holden Caulfield and other “coming-of-age” characters,
Tyrone Lock, the Alberta farm-boy would-be man of the world, seems now
rather pitiful than prescient, more laughable than laudable. It just
seems that his boorish behaviour, his dismissal of his parents’
values, and his cavalier treatment of devoted Miss Athena are despicable
rather than enviable.

Of course, we know that it is we who have changed, not the novel—and
that is a very good reason to read it again, to relive an era or even
revisit ourselves as we were then. For Stenson’s first novel is still
a masterful one, capable of evoking powerful images of youthful
anxieties (laugh or cry, if you wish), and is written with wit, charm,
and eloquence. “When did my life ever wait to consult me before going
ahead on its own?” asks Tyrone. When, indeed, we echo back.