Swan River: Memoir of a Family Mystery

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

The author never knew his paternal grandfather, Tom Reynolds, who left
his English family in some disgrace and sailed to Canada in 1906 to work
on the railroad. And family members were evasive as to the reason for
Tom’s absence; only Uncle George told a little, of Tom’s fondness
for whisky and the distress he caused his wife, and then ended with the
grave instruction that when he was older, David Reynolds should travel
to Swan River, Manitoba.

The words that haunted the child drive him through this biography of
three generations in and around London, England, including tales of his
music hall relatives and his own days in boarding school and on small
magazines in the 1960s, until in the last few pages he finally arrives
in Swan River and the village of Durban, where his grandfather died.

David Reynolds, a founder of Bloomsbury Publishing, was luckier than
most family members seeking to unearth the mystery of the past. His
grandmother, Tom’s wife, had kept a voluminous diary for many years;
his father, Clifton, was a published writer who had also written some
memories down before he began to open up and talk to his son; and in
Manitoba, the author met a local historian who helped him to find the
end of his grandfather’s story.

It reads like a novel. As the story moves backwards and forwards in
time, patterns emerge that invite apprehension and yet are mysteriously
resolved in the positive. There is a sad undercurrent of human failing,
but the writing is so full of life that the reader wishes only to keep
the pages turning. A description of a family dinner to which a
prospective husband has been invited is told with such loving attention
to detail, such delicate twanging of nerves, such a stealthy assertion
of a new presence in the family unit that one scarcely notices how the
disparate elements come together.

Supporting the text is a hand-drawn family tree in an early chapter,
and one photograph that is a surprise and a summation of all that has
gone before.