Terrence Heath enters dangerous country in his novel Casualties. The book is full of battle scenes from the Spanish Civil War and violence from Depression-era riots in Regina, but eventually, like a good scout, Heath leads us to a rather happy ending. Before we get there we’re buffeted between a rather conventional present-day love story and a complicated tale of political passion and personal disappointment that took place more than 60 years ago.

The novel opens with Clara Stemichuk, a recent widow, beginning to clear out her late husband Chuck’s things. In a pocket of his tuxedo jacket she finds a typewritten murder confession, which appears to be signed by one Thomas Pennan. She has no idea who the man was, but she feels compelled to find out about him and learn why the confession was important to her husband. She is greatly surprised to discover that a firebrand with her husband’s name was caught up in the Regina Riot and was a hero in the Canadian brigade fighting Franco in Spain.

Heath moves back and forth in time, between Clara in present-day Toronto, Vancouver, and Europe and Chuck Stemichuk and Thomas Pennan in Depression-struck Canada and wartorn Spain. Obviously Heath has done his research, and along the way he presents some important social history. A note in the back of the book thanks several archivists and experts for allowing Heath to see firsthand accounts of the events he writes about and the places he describes. The depth of his knowledge of radical politics on the Prairies as well as the battles of the Spanish Civil War also shines through in the novel’s details.

Heath demonstrates great courage in attempting to go mano-a-mano with the ghosts of Papa Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Unfortunately, this is not the Great Canadian Novel of the 1930s. Much tension is lost in all the time shifts, and the prose never quite meets the grandeur of the subject.