![]() ![]() Smallwood, who led Newfoundland into the Canadian Confederation in 1949, was to Newfoundland what Huey Long was to Louisiana: a power-happy populist and a local legend. ![]() By using Joe Smallwood, a historical personage, as his narrator, he finds a way of weaving a dreamlike course between fact and fiction. It's as much a character in the novel as India is in "Midnight's Children," and to invest it with this status, the author needs a figure commensurate with the history of the place. ![]() Newfoundland - or, as one of Johnston's characters calls it, perhaps more appropriately, Old Lost Land - is the oldest British colony, a hardscrabble island that for centuries was subject, as the book makes quite clear, to the idiocy of various crown schemes. Naipaul, and you can see them, too, in Wayne Johnston's new novel, "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams." You can see these forces at work in the novels of Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey and V.S. From the former, the writer draws enveloping fantasies from the latter, an elegant melancholy. It's writing that plays on two counterpoised registers: the nostalgia of the native for the pre-colonial land, and the nostalgia of the colonizer for the mother country. The literature of empire keeps floating up from the verges of the British Commonwealth like buoys marking some drowned leviathan. ![]()
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