When Irish guys are rebelling

On the campus of the University of Toronto stands a monument to the Canadians who fought in the 1866 battle of Ridgeway, when the Fenians — the mid-19th century equivalent of the Irish Republican Army — came marching to strike a blow at the British Empire, in southwestern Ontario. The monument is located in an odd nook, sandwiched between traffic on Queen’s Park Crescent and the back of a building where no one ever wanders. You really have to go out of your way to see this monument.

At the same time, in a hall of University College at the University of Toronto, a stainedglass window commemorates, among other things, two University College students were who killed at Ridgeway. Again, you have to know what you’re looking for to notice this posthumous tribute.

The obscurity of these two memorials reflects the place of the events commemorated in the Canadian historical memory, which is to say, their practical non-existence. In history books, the Fenian invasion of 1866 seems a last spasm of violence attendant on the American Civil War. Its only significance is that it served as a poke in the ribs of Canadian politicians to get done with the business of confederation. Not even the assassination of the Irish Catholic statesman Thomas D’Arcy McGee by a Fenian fanatic in the same year as Confederation, 1867, seems all that important. For a long time, in fact, the killing of McGee was considered in the light of a freak occurrence, the only political assassination in Canadian history. (A distinction since effaced by the FLQ murder of Pierre Laporte.)

Canadian fiction has been slow to enliven the narrative of these events. Jane Urquhart’s 1993 Away featured the assassination of McGee at the hands of an Irish fanatic, but the novel was more of a lyrical romance than a historical chronicle. Guy Vanderhaeghe’s 2011 A Good Man was undeniably a historical novel and contained a vivid description of the battle of Ridgeway, but that episode was subsequently outweighed in the novel by the presence of Sitting Bull.

Now Gordon Henderson, in his debut novel Man in the Shadows, concentrates entirely on the Fenian threat to Canada, the launching of Confederation, and the killing of McGee. A mix of fictional and non-fictional characters drives the story. John A. Macdonald and McGee are the central historical characters, of course, hovered over by their two anxious wives — who have good reason to be anxious. Both of their husbands are physically vulnerable, John A. at the mercy of his alcoholism and his shaky nerves, D’Arcy McGee suffering a leg ailment. They are also both potential targets for assassins, Irishmen permanently embittered by the famine in Ireland and disease and malnutrition among the passengers of the “coffin ships” bearing cargoes of Irish immigrants to Canada. “I want that damned country destroyed,” proclaims a Fenian Colonel based in the United States.

Fictional characters include the novel’s protagonist, the young Conor O’Dea, who survives a childhood in the lumber camps thanks to the care of his father, who manages to get the boy educated. Conor sub- sequently rises in the world, becoming an assistant to McGee, whom he regards as “the greatest Irish Catholic Canadian of the day,” but he is still unsure about everything from table manners — should he use the American or the English style while handling a fork? — to proper wardrobe, correct pronunciation of words, literary taste and so on. Everything he does or says, Henderson writes, is liable to expose “his simple background and clumsiness.” This insecurity is heightened whenever Meg Trotter, daughter of a boarding house keeper in Ottawa, shows up to set a-twitter the smitten heart of O’Dea.

Unfortunately, their love affair is complicated by Conor’s father, one of the Irish immigrants who cannot forgive or forget the callous behaviour of the British, and who drowns his sorrows, including the loss of his young wife, in whiskey. The father hates McGee in particular for his moderation and willingness to work with British politicians in fashioning a new, tolerant nation. “We are building a northern country of compromise, good faith and fair play,” McGee proclaims.

This brings us to the title character, a Fenian agent known only as the man in the shadows. We never learn his real name but follow his sinister courses around Montreal and Ottawa, seeking accomplices and scouting locations for a successful assassination. The time is critical. If both McGee and Macdonald are assassinated it will be a signal to the thousands of Fenians in the United States — many of them battle-hardened Union veterans — that Canada is disintegrating, and that another invasion can be launched, this time without American interference, to destroy the fledgling nation.

This character takes pains to obscure his face and form

‘I want that damned country destroyed,’ proclaims a Fenian Colonel

by literally staying in shadows. A potential accomplice tries “to catch a view of the person’s face in the flickering gas light, but the man stayed in the shadows,” Henderson writes. The phrase takes on a metaphorical dimension — John A.’s wife regards her husband’s attacks of dipsomania as a disappearance “into the shadows,” and fears that he will “descend into the shadows” in response to a crisis.

Henderson portrays a grim atmosphere, then, attendant on the founding of Confederation, with hatreds ever quick to surface and violence to erupt. Not the jolliest of birthdays for a new country. But Henderson does a real service to the Canadian historical imagination in accurately evoking such an atmosphere and such a period.

Unfortunately his characters — even the bibulous Macdonald and the lively McGee — tend to be wooden, and their speech stilted. The author lacks a certain touch in bringing to life these men and women. Some improbabilities — mainly the drastic turnabout and conversion of Conor’s father — also remain. But with the publication of this book the figures on that isolated monument at the University of Toronto have heard what may be the first stirrings of interest in what they did and what they represented. With any luck, at the hands of other historical novelists, those stirrings should increase. Even the ghosts of outraged Fenians may some day find peace.