Unknown Soldier

C. Stephen Gray is Director of Information Services, Institute of
Chartered Accountants of Ontario.

George Payerle’s Unknown Soldier is one of those rare novels whose main character is strong enough to carry the other elements and produce a successful and satisfying whole.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the hero, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, floating backward and forward, from his youth to the day he dies, unable to re-assemble his mental well-being after having witnessed the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. The hero of Payerle’s work is Sam Collister, a nearly derelict World War II veteran who witnessed the death of his best friend (and many others) as a Canadian foot soldier in Europe. Like Billy Pilgrim, Collister is “stuck” in time, in the sense that the reality of having experienced the war has changed his life ever since. The involuntary flashbacks and proud memories which dominate Collister’s mental life have made him a social outcast, driving him from his wife and son, his job at the Post Office, and ultimately to the fringes of Victoria’s skid row.

As he and his war buddies grow older, Collister grows increasingly bellicose and bitter about being an unappreciated misfit whose best years are now 40 years in the past. Collister increasingly longs for the release of death. Along with him, the reader longs for Payerle to provide his hero with one final chance of redemption.

The chance comes for Collister in the form of a reconciliation with his estranged son, Hugh (named for the best friend who died next to him in the war), the death in England of his sister, Charlotte, and the chance meeting of a woman in Victoria, Lily, with whom the possibility of love seems more than a cynical lie.

The novel is memorable for the innate strength of Collister’s character, and for the complexity Payerle brings to one of urban North America’s most superficial cliches: the World War veteran whose time is spent drinking too much and obsessed by past glory. After several hours’ immersion in Unknown Soldier, readers will find it more difficult to see these common objects of urban indifference with the same degree of self-satisfaction. And that alone makes Payerle’s work useful.