The Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Ted McGee is a professor of English at St. Jerome’s College,
University of Waterloo.

Marc Tétro dedicates The Royal Canadian Mounted Police to “all the
grandparents who’ve ever wanted to tell the story of the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police to their grandchildren.” The work certainly
suits his purpose: for little children the book has compelling pictures;
for grandparents, it has a spare text, one that is easy both to read and
to supplement with their own storytelling. Tétro, too, tells a story,
as he traces (in the first half of the book or so) the Mounties’
involvement in the building of the railroad (another national symbol)
and the settlement of the West. He offers a series of historical notes
and images, including the Mounties’ musical ride, the Klondike gold
rush, the Inuit exploring the Arctic, and King Edward VII, then moves to
their present role of “protecting Canadians by watching over the
country’s borders from the Maritimes to the Yukon.”

Readers of this book may well recognize Tétro’s bold, bright
illustrations, since they have become popular on mugs, backpacks,
T-shirts, placemats, and the like. Unlike the icons reproduced for gift
shops, the more complex pictures in this book display both Tétro’s
simplicity of design and his wit, the former epitomized by the blank
faces of most humans, the latter by the individuation of Mounties by
style of mustachio. The playfulness extends to the format, as
illustrations cross seams and wrap around pages so as to cover three or
four pages in all. “Awesome!” was the spontaneous reaction of my
5-year-old on first glancing at the dust jacket; “great pictures”
was his later, more considered assessment. Highly recommended.