The Englishman's Boy

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Not long after the U.S. Civil War, a dozen heavily armed frontiersmen
fought a bloody one-sided battle against a band of Assiniboine Indians
in the Cypress Hills just north of the Canada–U.S. border. This
obscure battle is the background for this novel, which explores the
central themes of myth and identity.

As Harry Vincent hacks his modest writing talents in Hollywood in the
late 1920s, his employer, Damon Chance, commissions Vincent to convince
an elderly cowboy named Shorty McAdoo to sign over the rights to his
life story. Chance tells Vincent that he needs McAdoo’s experiences to
be the foundation of an authentic western epic. Vincent realizes too
late that Chance really plans to use McAdoo’s name to give credibility
to his own right-wing ideology.

The storyline advances in two alternating streams. First, McAdoo is
seen as “the Englishman’s boy,” a teenage runaway working as a
wealthy Englishman’s servant in the 1870s in the American west. Then
the story jumps 60 years to find Shorty running out the clock in
Hollywood, where he still finds occasional work as a movie-extra cowboy.

Perhaps to underscore the tension between myth and identity, many of
the characters in the novel are stereotypes who unexpectedly break from
the mold. Harry Vincent is a typical Canadian striving against his
richer and more beautiful American counterparts; he finds success in
mere survival. Damon Chance is an old-money millionaire who wants to be
part of a new world order; to achieve this, he seeks to re-invent
history. Shorty McAdoo is the typical “little guy” Americans claim
to revere; he is, in reality, a perpetual victim of the American Dream.

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s finely crafted prose and historical insight deftly
lob the reader back and forth like a shuttlecock between myth and
identity. This is a very fine book.