This Island in Time: Remarkable Tales from Montreal's Past.

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality.

The joys of reading are numerous and varied. For some reading is simple diversion from the affairs of the world; for others it is an escape into romance, fiction, or fantasy of many sorts. Some readers seek edification, whether in traditional academic subjects or how-to books; others read literary fiction to be lost in the sumptuousness of exhilarating prose that speaks to our time.

Popular history is one genre with a continuous tradition since at least the eighteenth century, but its quality is uneven. Some popular history seeks to edify, others to amuse or entertain—though such categories are not mutually exclusive. Edward Collard wrote breezily about Montreal’s past while Toronto journalist Pierre Berton, with a terrific researcher, added to knowledge and erected a seemingly national history embraced by many and despised as eastern Canadian propaganda by some.

Journalist John Kalbfleisch follows in the tradition of Edward Collard in producing lighter shards of popular history. In this book he pulls the pieces together into six untitled chapters that deal with nature’s effects on the city, royalty, spies and traitors, unusual characters, a criminal case, and Montreal in national history. Whatever their tastes, readers are expected to be amused enough by the flow of the narrative to continue reading about a variety of subjects that may or may not interest them. The critical eye is alerted to the pedestrian nature of the writing style by the opening phrase in Chapter 1: “In the beginning …” What follows in that chapter is a miscellany of fact wrapped in a generally pleasing but undistinguished narrative. And so it continues.

Anyone reading for more than diversion or amusement will be disappointed because the accounts are superficial. We get no real understanding why Elizabeth II was whisked from Montreal to Ottawa during her visit in 1967, or the serious threats to civil liberties posed by the trials of people such as Raymond Boyer in the Igor Gouzenko spy affair following the Second World War. The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, authored by a mentally deranged woman in 1836, is discussed as it titillates through supposedly exposing the sexual foibles of priests and nuns, but Kalbfleisch does not consider the more interesting question of why such salacious, fantastical rant should appear at this time and place. Context is subordinated to stories.

Academic history developed in reaction to the superficiality of this type of history, but also to counter the errors of the popularizers repeating earlier accounts without research into their veracity. The last chapter contains a howler. It says that Quebec nationalist Henri Bourassa, then entering dotage, was the Canadian Governor General who hailed the Red Ensign first being flown as Canada’s national flag. Neither Bourassa nor the Governor General at the time, the Earl of Bessborough (of hotel fame in Saskatchewan now), would be amused. I should imagine, though, that Henri Bourassa took considerable pride in the adoption of the fleur-de-lis provincial flag by the government of Maurice Duplessis in 1948.