This Dear and Fine Country

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

The narrator of these sketches, Abraham Boggs (a.k.a. Skipper Abe) is a funny, middle-aged resident of Bung Hole Tickle near St. John’s. His wry sense of humour, caustic tongue, gift of the gab, colorful Newfoundland language, and love of his province make the opinionated Skipper a joy to read. No subject is too great or too small for Abraham Boggs, who discourses on politics, metric measure, car parts, family members, Mounties, communists, liquor, and St. John’s with gusto. A whole day he wasted in St. John’s searching for a “comical nut” for his ‘64 pick-up. Discovering one of his liquor bottles to be bad, he saves two inches of it to return to the store. To spruce himself up, he buys $9.95 reddish pants with a purple cheek and dumps a whole bottle of Evening in Paris into his bath. With the $1,475 he won at bingo he takes a holiday in Florida on St. Pete’s Beach. He is not fond of the big city of St. John’s: he visits it “only when force put”; “Can any good ever come out of St. John’s?”; “I never was no lover of shopping in St. John’s in the best of times”; St. John’s consists of “Confederation Building, the mental hospital, and the jail. And the crowd that’s in one place should be in the other place and the other way around.” Arguing with Aunt Polly, he says: “Who wants the most in the world,’ I said, ‘to keep Canada together if it isn’t them communists living over there in Russia? They’re doing all they can to keep Canada together just to spite the States. The States,’ I said, ‘is only looking for the day when they can chop Canada up in bits because the pieces is easier to swallow up. Separatists like meself is fighting for the American Way of Life.’” This is the epitome of an Abe Boggs opinion.

Abe Boggs makes his readers curious about his creator. Ray Guy, born in 1939 in Arnold’s Cove, Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, eventually studied journalism at Ryerson, then worked on the St. John’s Evening Telegram until 1975, when he retired to freelance. Unlike Boggs. Guy is married and has children. His columns are read widely by his fellow Newfoundlanders. That Far Greater Bay (1977), his second collection of humourous essays, won the 29th Leacock Award for Humour. This Dear and Fine Country is another collection of 49 sketches guaranteed to entertain, whether read piecemeal or as a whole. As a whole, it portrays interesting glimpses of Newfoundland.