Hidden Canada: An Intimate Travelogue

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.

Norman Ravvin is a young writer to watch. He has already published an
unusually confident novel, a stylistically varied book of short stories,
and a shrewd and even moving book of criticism. Now, as if ticking off
the literary subgenres, he has produced an absorbing travel book.

Hidden Canada consists of seven chapters in which Ravvin explores a
number of significant areas and topics off the accustomed tourist track.
He is especially interested in those aspects of Canadian historical
experience that are in danger of being forgotten: Kateri Tekakwitha, the
Mohawk candidate for sainthood who no longer interests her own people;
the official tidying-up (destruction) of Malcolm Lowry’s Dollarton;
the disappearance of the old Calgary; the settlements of escaped black
slaves in Southern Ontario (where tourists prefer Uncle Tom to authentic
history); the vanished Jewish communities on the Saskatchewan prairie;
the decaying Hastings area of Vancouver; and (with a slight change of
focus) the vanished cod and returning whales at Trinity, Newfoundland.

Ravvin at one point describes himself as a “memory-tourist,” but he
is never sentimental. In many respects, this is a sad book; like its
author, we are often “overwhelmed by a sense of all that’s
vanished.” And sometimes the reaction is more bitter, whereupon we
recognize a numbed resignedness reminiscent of Norman Levine’s classic
Canada Made Me. But Hidden Canada consoles by its very quality; it is a
timely rescue operation that, in perhaps the only way possible,
preserves at least something of the history whose disappearance it
laments. Ravvin’s book begins as journalism, albeit a superior,
responsible, accurate journalism (though I doubt if he ever heard
jackdaws singing in the Mohawk territory in New York State!). But his
imaginative sensibility and stylistic clarity and flexibility succeed in
transforming journalism into art.

Hidden Canada is illustrated with photographs, mainly by Ravvin
himself. He is often hampered by physical conditions, and his
photography is less expert than his writing, yet their very
amateurishness fits this impressively human book as a glossy
professionalism could never do.