Reader Be Thou Also Ready

Marie T. Gillis is a member of the Angus L. Macdonald Library staff at
St. Francis Xavier University.

The writing of good historical fiction is a difficult craft to master.
Sympathetic imagination and analytical skills must be combined with
writing expertise to create a world in which fact and fiction blend
seamlessly. If any element is weak, the whole work suffers. Such is the
case with Reader Be Thou Also Ready.

The author, Robert James, is a direct descendant of William Fawcett,
who immigrated to Canada in 1774 and settled in Sackville, New
Brunswick. On the night of June 19, 1832, while at prayer, Fawcett was
killed “by some monster of iniquity … who intentionally shot him
dead through the kitchen window.” These details are found in the
elaborate epitaph on Fawcett’s tombstone. Two articles in the New
Brunswick Royal Gazette confirm the epitaph and relate the trial and
acquittal of Fawcett’s son, Rufus.

James has elected to relate this family narrative as a novel, and by
choosing that genre, has doomed the project. There are simply too few
relevant facts to sustain a work of this length. To solve this problem,
James pads his story with incidental details of 19th-century pioneer
life. This means that he must contrive his plot to such a degree that
the reader scoffs at the fiction and loses faith in the facts. Moreover,
his characterizations are uniformly one-dimensional. It gives nothing
away to identify Rufus as the accused in the murder since, from the
moment he is introduced—at the age of two!—he is painted as a
villain; one can almost see the black hat.

Beyond these problems, errors of grammar and punctuation litter the
text. Robert James’s intentions were good; unfortunately, his reach
far exceeded his grasp. This piece of Fawcett family history deserves a
better fate.