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Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor
Dundurn Press presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.
This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.
The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.
OTHER VOYAGEUR CLASSICS TITLES
The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Dr. Collett Tracey 978-1-55002-666-5
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology, edited and introduced by Germaine Warkentin 978-1-55002-661-0
Combat Journal for Place d’Armes: A Personal Narrative by Scott Symons, introduced by Christopher Elson 978-1-55488-457-5
The Donnellys by James Reaney, introduced by Alan Filewod 978-1-55002-832-4
Empire and Communications by Harold A. Innis, introduced by Alexander John Watson 978-1-55002-662-7
The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada by William Kilbourn, introduced by Ronald Stagg 978-1-55002-800-3
In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton, edited and introduced by Harold Rhenisch 978-1-55002-769-3
The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser 1806–1808, edited and introduced by W. Kaye Lamb, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-713-6
Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of French Canada by Louis Hémon, translated by W.H. Blake, introduction and notes by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-712-9
The Men of the Last Frontier by Grey Owl, introduced by James Polk 978-1-55488-804-7
Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary by Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe, edited and introduced by Mary Quayle Innis, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-768-6
Pilgrims of the Wild, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-734-7
The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada by Benjamin Drew, introduced by George Elliott Clarke 978-1-55002-801-0
The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune by Ted Allan and Sydney Ostrovsky, introduced by Julie Allan, Dr. Norman Allan, and Susan Ostrovsky 978-1-55488-402-5
Selected Writings by A.J.M. Smith, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-665-8
Self Condemned by Wyndham Lewis, introduced by Allan Pero 978-1-55488-735-4
The Silence on the Shore by Hugh Garner, introduced by George Fetherling 978-1-55488-782-8
Storm Below by Hugh Garner, introduced by Paul Stuewe 978-1-55488-456-8
A Tangled Web by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Benjamin Lefebvre 978-1-55488-403-2
The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside by Patrick Slater, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-848-5
The Town Below by Roger Lemelin, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-803-0
Pauline Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose by Pauline Johnson, selected and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45970-428-2
The Kindred of the Wild: A Book of Animal Life by Charles G.D. Roberts, introduced by James Polk 978-1-45970-147-2
All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion by Peregrine Acland, introduced by Brian Busby and James Calhoun, and with a preface by Ford Madox Ford 978-1-45970-423-7
In Flanders Fields and Other Poems by John McCrae, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45972-864-6
Rining the Changes: An Autobiography by Mazo de la Roche, introcuded by Heather Kirk 978-1-45973-037-3
The Regiment by Farley Mowat, introduced by Lee Windsor 978-1-45973-389-3
Introduction
When Philip Child’s novel God’s Sparrows was published in the spring of 1937 by the British publisher Thornton Butterworth, the realistic war novel was a more than decade-old phenomenon, familiar to readers in all the combatant nations of the Great War. What we now think of as the canonical texts of the First World War: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–28), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1929), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), had established a pattern of gritty realism, detailing both the physical and psychological horrors of modern war. Any serious novel with literary ambitions that followed these was required to fall in step and deliver what readers and reviewers had come to see as an “authentic” portrait of war. Authors who failed to detail the innumerable horrors of combat were dismissed as writers of romance or worse, propaganda, and not to be taken seriously.
Canadian writers who had served during the war contributed to and mirrored the trend that favoured realism in war literature, while simultaneously addressing how the Canadian war experience, though similar, differed from that of our allies. Peregrine Acland’s All Else is Folly (1929), republished by Dundurn in 2014, was the first of several realistic Canadian war novels published in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain that showed the war from a distinctly Canadian perspective. Several more significant novels would follow in quick succession: Leslie Roberts’s When the Gods Laughed , George Godwin’s Why Stay We Here? , W. Redvers Dent’s Show Me Death! , and Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed would all be published in 1930 in multiple editions throughout the English-speaking world, to varying levels of critical and commercial success.
As the effects of the Great Depression worsened, however, Canadian war novels written by veterans ceased to appear altogether.[1] Why this is so is not entirely clear: Canadian memoirs and histories continued to be published throughout the 1930s, while writers such as Will R. Bird, Harold Cruickshank, and Benge Atlee published dozens of short stories in the pulps and newspapers that dealt directly with the war. Despite the popularity of other forms of Canadian war writing, the Canadian war novel entered a dormant period after the boom of 1930. God’s Sparrows , published in 1937, was the last Canadian novel of the war written by a combatant before the Second World War began.
This is the jacket of the rare first edition of God’s Sparrows, published in 1937 by Thornton Butterworth.
Despite its appearance at the tail end of the war book boom, God’s Sparrows was “one of the most favourably reviewed books of 1937” in Canada.[2] Though many expressed minor reservations about the novel, the overall tone was glowing: the Globe and Mail ’s Saturday Review of Books section, edited by William Arthur Deacon, stated, “there are realistic descriptions of trench fighting that are second to none, and the minute-to-minute recording of mental states in the half-hour before zero is an impressive climax, calculated to move the indifferent.”[3] The novel was hailed by Dr. J.R. MacGillivray in the University of Toronto Quarterly , while the McMaster Quarterly recommended the novel as “a distinguished work of Canadian literature.”