The Montreal in Ray Smith’s The Man Who Loved Jane Austen is a dismal place: ice storms, a Ministry of Education that wants to regulate all aspects of academic life, old watering holes and drinking buddies who have changed almost beyond recognition, not to mention the ever-present super-charged political scene.

But the life that Frank Wilson, Smith’s hero, is leading would be pretty awful anywhere. As the book opens, poor Frank is doing the best he can to keep his home safe and secure for his sons, Simon, 4, and Jonathan, 8, in the aftermath of the death of his beloved wife, Emma, in a car crash. But Emma’s parents and her terrible sister are plotting to kidnap the boys from Frank’s comfy house in Lower Westmount and install them in the family’s mansion in Upper Westmount. There they will go to St.Crispin’s School and, presumably, join the ruling class.

A terrible fate, thinks Frank, who, like Smith, is a transplanted son of Cape Breton. He considers taking a job at a third-rate Ontario school to be able to provide better for the boys, but it’s clear from the outset that Frank is in for an uphill (pun intended) fight. And despite background menace of separatism and Quebec nationalism, the book’s real villains are proudly and stereotypically English. (Remember that St.Crispin’s Day was when Henry V defeated the French at Agincourt.)

The book is full of well-observed detail: Smith writes brilliantly about children, while the snippets of conversation that occur again and again capture faithfully – and sometimes hilariously – what people have been talking about lately in Montreal. The literary references are also fun: for example, what are we to make of the fact that there’s also a Frank in Jane Austen’s Emma?

It would be a mistake to read this book as anything more than what it is: an engrossing, funny, somewhat sentimental account of a middle-aged man’s attempt to keep his life from unravelling. Not that that’s anything to be ashamed of: Jane Austen didn’t write about the political events of her day, but Frank (and Ray Smith, among others) still think she’s a pretty terrific writer. –