The Chancellor's Foot

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

There have been lawyers and politicians who have become successful
writers (John Le Carré in Britain and William Deverell in Canada come
immediately to mind). Drawing upon personal experiences and knowledge,
they use this material in the service of their writing skills. But the
skills have to be there first, in good measure, else the material
becomes quaint, clichéd, clumsy. This is the problem with Ron Atkey’s
first novel. If earnestness were all that mattered, The Chancellor’s
Foot would not be the failure that it is. Atkey was an MP, the minister
of employment and immigration in Joe Clark’s government. He served as
the first chairman of SIRC (the watchdog body for the Canadian Security
Intelligence Service) and is currently a senior partner in one of the
country’s largest law firms. He should not quit his day job. His novel
of political intrigue, drugs, and influence lacks both plot ingenuity
and believable characters.

Montreal lawyer Alan Chant is called into service by the Leader of the
Opposition, moves to Ottawa, and is quickly involved in a drug-smuggling
scheme, immigration fraud, and love affairs.

Atkey has a habit of trying to squeeze too much exposition into a
single paragraph. Chapter 16, for example, begins this way: “When it
finally became apparent to Antoinette by the end of the summer that Alan
no longer worked at Chant & Doucet, she began to panic. At Hélиne’s
suggestion, she called Alan at Savard’s office in Ottawa.
Unfortunately, by that time the election had been called and Alan was
spending seven days a week crisscrossing the country as part of
Savard’s entourage, dubbed by the media as ‘The Second Coming.’
Her calls went unanswered and she assumed the worst.”

Most of the novel sounds this way. Rather than dramatize the plot,
Atkey simply tells the reader what has happened, often telegraphing what
will happen, and, most unfortunately, explaining exactly why.