Great Realizations
Description
$28.95
ISBN 0-88784-171-6
DDC C813'.54
Author
Publisher
Year
Contributor
W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.
Review
Not Great Expectations, but rather Great Realizations. The penultimate
novel in Hugh Hood’s magisterial, grossly underrated novel-series. The
New Age/Le nouveau siиcle is set not, like Dickens’s novel in the
19th century, but in the 21st century.
Like its immediate predecessor, Dead Men’s Watches (1995), this novel
tells two stories that intersect at various levels. One, which takes
place on an international (indeed, interplanetary) level, is the story
of the first manned space-flight to Mars; the other, which shares the
same time span but focuses on the national (Canadian) level, narrates
the acquisition of a major work of art—“the last Titian”—for the
National Gallery of Canada. The stories are linked by the fact that John
Sleaford Goderich—the younger son of the central figure in the series,
now a distinguished theoretical physicist—becomes, by virtue of his
research into the properties of gravity, a participant in the first
landing on the red planet, while Matt himself, through his expertise as
an art historian, plays a crucial role in the negotiations surrounding
the Titian.
The first story belongs to science fiction; the second to a novel of
political intrigue. But one doesn’t have to be an enthusiast for
either genre to enjoy this accomplished, well-proportioned, efficiently
designed piece of narrative writing. The claims of science and art in
the plans and budgets of modern governments may be an interlinking
theme, but the human element is never forgotten, and its centrality is
an overriding concern (a male and a female astronaut conduct a romance
in space; John Goderich’s wife gives birth to a son while he lands on
another planet). And in the course of negotiating the coup in the art
world, Matt ties up some of the dangling threads in his own life, just
as Hood skilfully complicates the numerous strands that make up his
ambitious story.
The New Age series is destined to become one of the triumphs of
Canadian literature. Great Realizations, like the space vehicle, keeps
the series firmly on course.