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Broken Ground

by Jack Hodgins

Broken Ground is a departure for Governor General’s Award-winning author Jack Hodgins. The Vancouver Island setting and the humour of The Macken Charm and Spit Delaney’s Island are here, but Broken Ground is finely complemented by themes of darkness and tragedy.

Set in 1922 in Portuguese Creek, the story takes place on a settlement in the Comox Valley where servicemen returning from the First World War have been given free land to farm. The land is rocky and covered with huge stumps requiring backbreaking and dangerous labour to clear, and the struggles and hardships of establishing farms take place against a backdrop of unresolved war memories – for example, no ex-soldier will enclose his land with barbed wire. In the present, a forest fire burning out of control in the nearby hills provides a lurking threat to the lives and property of the colonists. Eventually the fire sweeps down through the small community, changing lives forever and providing a new focus and beginning.

The story is told by 10 Portuguese Creek residents who each give their own view of unfolding events and their fellow settlers. As the story progresses, we come to know Charlie MacIntosh, a boy who sees his father killed trying to destroy a stump; Matthew Pearson who is struggling with the loss of a daughter and the memory of a friend shot for desertion; Johanna Seyersted who sits waiting for her missing-in-action husband to return; and Wyatt Tyler who has ridden across Canada, hopelessly following his fiancée. Each brings a distinct voice to the narrative, and together they weave a seamless tale of memory and hope.

Broken Ground is rich and complex, gradually drawing the reader into its many threads while vividly portraying the Canadian soldiers’ experience in the First World War and their subsequent struggle to carve a life out of the wilderness while dealing with the past. This is a finely written fictional history that touches, informs, and makes you think.

 

Reviewer: John Wilson

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $29.99

Page Count: 320 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-7710-4185-5

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 1998-9

Categories: Fiction: Novels