The reader witnesses how war can bore into the soldier's soul latching on to some key aspect of his being and sharpening it, focusing it, until it defines him. The friends are drawn together by their shared history and heritage and pushed apart by their differing responses to the horrors of trench warfare. This despite the fact that the pair remains together, in the same Southern Ontario Rifles company, for the entirety of their military careers.Įlijah, confident in his use of English from his years at the residential school in Moose Factory, becomes a decorated and renowned sniper while Xavier, easily Elijah's equal in terms of marksmanship, is rendered practically invisible as a result of his poor mastery of English, his distaste for killing and his proximity to his more sociable cohort. But their search for adventure takes them down diverging paths. Bird and his childhood friend Elijah Weesageechak (pronounced Whiskeyjack by the Wemistikoshiw, or English-speaking Canadians) decide to leave the confines of their Northern Ontario existence behind them and join the Canadian army. Boyden has chosen to tell his tale of violence, loneliness and madness primarily from the point of view of Xavier Bird, a Cree Indian from the Moose Factory, Ontario area. The book explores many of the obsessions that colour all his writing: violence, loneliness, a concern for animal rights, and the survival of the individual in a world of madness."īut Findley's revered novel now has a worthy challenger for the title of best fictional reflection of Canada's WWI story in Three Day Road.
According to Findley's Library & Archives of Canada biography, "he wrote the novel in guise of a researcher trying to reconstruct the story of Robert Ross, a soldier of the Great War. "We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy, the one facing what we do to the enemy." Everything else in this terrific book is an expansion on this central notion.įor the past quarter-century, the definitive novel of the Canadian experience of the 1st World War has been Timothy Findley's third book, the Governor General's Award-winning The Wars (1977). The essence of Joseph Boyden's debut novel, Three Day Road, is captured with remarkable precision and brevity in a single sentence 50 pages from the completion of the story.
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