A Place Out of Time
by Alfred Silver
Winnipeg: Great Plains Publications, 2007, ISBN 978-1-894283-74-8, 560 pp., $24.95 paper.

Alf Silver's novel A Place Out of Time, an inter-generational epic set in the first province to join Confederation after 1867, should come with a disclaimer, a consumer warning. Be aware that, at 560 pages, in a minuscule font, it is a groaner, in more ways than one (heft and length). But, if you love Manitoba, or Canadian history in general, you will want to accept the challenge, to shoulder the weight and plow into the story anyway. Read it the way you first read a holy book--a certain quota of pages per day for a certain allotted time. Your faith will be rewarded.

The first reward in A Place Out of Time is the setting itself--the rivers, the riverbanks, the fields, forests, forts, and settlements around the Forks, in that turbulent pivotal decade, the1860s. The second pleasure is the plot, the parallel stories told from two very different perspectives. The values and goals of the old settler families are presented through the eyes of young Hugh John Sutherland and his family, the Point Douglas Sutherlands. John Christian Schultz and his wife Agnes Campbell Farquharson Schultz represent the greedy skewed dreams of the Ontario Canadian carpetbaggers with dollar signs spinning where eyeballs should be. Around these two camps cluster the other stakeholders--the garrisoned traders inside the Hudson's Bay Company fort, the French-speaking Roman Catholic Metis community with a new young leader, and the Anglican First Nations of Chief Peguis' people at St. Peter's. American Irish Catholics with Fenian leanings wanting to attack Britain or to annex territory. The Portage la Prairie contingent ready to march. Surveyors and politicians sent by Ottawa before the turnover, the troops, and the train change the Northwest forever. Just trying to document all the factions makes it obvious why the book has to be so big. Silver weaves the conflict between the dreams of these groups, coloured with unexpected plot twists which evoke emotion--hope, anger, grief, acceptance--into a heavy blanket of a novel that still manages to surprise readers with previously undiscovered details about a beloved familiar place.

Like the setting, plot, and points of view, the characters in this novel are interesting and appealing. The Sutherland family values are articulated by the patriarch, remembering his life in Scotland and fighting in the Napoleonic War. Defying those who think "that glory means marching behind a regimental band in a victory parade," Old Man Sutherland expounds that "the glory was in seeing the field outside your front door waving with golden barley where once there'd been nothing but prairie twitch-grass and bramble, in seeing your sweat-soaked, beautiful wife holding the red and wrinkled baby to her breast, in binding the last patch of roof-thatch onto your own house you'd built with your own hands." [p.228] The Schultz family's outsider status, combined with their sense of cultural superiority, and the dangerous connections they still have to Toronto money and Ottawa power, bode ill for other communities.

Silver's portrayal of Red River, implying that since the the early days of the settlement, the many facets of community at the confluence had lived together in mutual respect and support, is perhaps idealized. [See p. 353] The suggestion that racist attitudes, dismissive towards First Nations, Metis, French, and Catholic, arrived with the Ontario "prospectors" looking for capitalist gold is also suspicious. We in the Canadian West would like to believe that, but, human nature being what it is, it seems somewhat doubtful to me. It could also be dangerous for it allows us to maintain that victim position, believing that we were doing all right and would be successful without external capital, if only we had been left alone. Perhaps this is another of those myths of identity which allow us to deflect blame and evade responsibility. Well, I'm meandering here, like the Assiniboine before it forks into the Red, but the point is that A Place Out of Time invites argument and speculation, engagement with the larger themes through our connection or rejection of the fictionalized characters and their dreams. What more can we ask of our literature?

J.M. Bridgeman writes from BC's Fraser River Valley.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.


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