CERTAIN BOOKS TRY to tell the whole truth and nothing but – and so, of course, they should. Histories of wars, biographies of prime ministers, Manchurian cookbooks, guides to protozoa and their tendencies: from all these we expect sturdy facts, with the manufacturer’s failsafe guarantee, by which to shore up our understanding of the world.

From novels and from poems we expect truth, too, it’s just that poets and novelists are entitled – and indeed expected, even encouraged – to get at their truth by lies. Fiction is lies; all we readers ask is that those lies be wholly absorbing ones, and beautiful.

So what about travel writers, the literary breed that embraces the likes of Bruce Chatwin, Jonathan Raban, and Paul Theroux? Somewhere, it seems to be, travel writing got a reputation for absolute reliability; word somehow got round that travel writers were licenced only to practice non-fiction, to observe and record, with strict orders not to stray to fiction or fancy.

If that’s true, Rory MacLean must have lost his licence somewhere on the road. With his second book, The Oatmeal Ark: Across Canada by Water, he advertises that if that’s the case, then he’s pleased to have turned outlaw. As subtitled, it’s a book that chronicles a journey that by all available evidence was undertaken in the fall of 1995. It’s a sharply focused discovery of modern-day Canada as well as a poignant rumination on its past. Like MacLean’s 1992 hybrid, Stalin’s Nose, it’s uproariously entertaining to boot.

Ghostly chorus

But is it a travel book in anything but subtitle? The fact is, it’s as full of lies as any good novel. And indeed novelistic precedents and strategies openly abound; the main character is a largely fictional fellow called Beagan Gillean; the narrative is overseen by a chorus of ghosts.

MacLean’s own statement on the subject comes in a prefatory note. “The Oatmeal Ark,” he writes, “weaves invention through true stories, stitches imaginary characters into real events…. In my writing I strive to cross the line beyond which fact becomes myth to find a truth that is made sharper in fiction.”

That is, of course, precisely what travel writers have been doing for years, from the time of Alexander Kinglake’s 1840 classic Eothen through Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, on into Chatwin, Raban, Theroux, to any Canadian practitioner you care to name: George Woodcock, Ronald Wright, or Karen Connelly. In the interest of narrative – in the interest of sharpening truth by fiction – all of them stretched, dissembled, compressed events and characters, crossed the line, and their books are the better for it. It’s just that none of them was ever so honest at the outset as MacLean is.

Paul Fussell accounts for it most clearly, perhaps, in his book, highly recommended, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between The Wars. “A travel book,” he writes there, “is like a poem in giving universal significance to a local texture.” In this, Fussell continues, “there is ample room for the activities of the ‘fictionalizing’ imagination.

“And an active, organic, and, if you will, ‘creative’ mediation between fact and fiction is exactly the activity of the mind exhibited in the travel book, which Samuel Hynes has accurately perceived to be ‘a dual-plane work with a strong realistic surface, which is yet a parable.’”

In The Oatmeal Ark, the strong realistic surface is Canada itself and the parable that MacLean pursues is a sad one about the present we’ve made out of our past. But MacLean’s own family history is also instrumental – indeed, if it’s not too geographically confusing to say it this way, family is the route by which the book travels cross-country. MacLean is, as the book jacket helpfully offers, “grandson of the co-founder of the Maclean’s publishing group.” But the MacLeans’ is a story of a promise denied: the family no longer control the publishing group. The Oatmeal Ark finds Canada in a similar predicament: disheartened, displaced, disinherited.

The story begins, as did the MacLeans and their fictional stand-ins, the Gilleans, in Scotland. Beagan has long been unsettled in his soul – born in Canada he (like Rory MacLean) has lived many years away from his homeland. Out of the blue, there falls to him a steamer trunk, full of family papers. One of them is a long-lost deed to a small island off the British Columbia shore and Beagan decides, on the Scottish spot, to make his way to it. He senses his own salvation in the journey, which he resolves to make (as much as the map allows) by boat, the Gilleans always having taken pleasure in being afloat. For luggage – as a kind of travelling oracle and archive – Beagan takes the bulging family trunk.

So they go, packing a supply of Kwell anti-seasick pills, crossing the Atlantic first on a hulking freighter, with grandfatherly Gillean ghosts accompanying shipboard. The ghosts watch over Beagan and, while they’re at it, trace the family’s rising fortunes from their arrival in hardscrabble Cape Breton through the growth of their publishing and communications empire.

Beagan’s story, meanwhile, is anchored in the actualities of his journey and the ongoing comedy, once he hits North America, of trying to navigate a way west. He paddles his Peterborough lapstrake canoe; he waylays powerboats, Muskoka launches, paddle boats, lakers on the Great Lakes, an Icelandic whitefish boat on Lake Winnipeg; he dreams of crossing the Rockies in a bathtub.

Superior shone silver

He’s a knowledgeable traveller, with a historical anecdote at every pause. He also works with a vigilant outsider’s eye. “In Ontario no one says thank you to a whore,” he offers at one point and, later: “Superior shone like burnished silver, possibly from the mercury that had been pumped into it by the pulp mills and chlor-alkali plants.”

He has a knack, too, for meeting people – just the right, talkative people, ones with telling wits and opinions especially. There may not, in fact, be a single purely incidental character in the entire book; some of them, unfortunately, are a little too conveniently emblematic to be true. In Toronto, for instance, Beagan meets “a Sikh Mountie in a turban.” At a Montreal gas pump, a Greek-born attendant tells him that “Quebec has been ruined by the politicians.” His colleague intercedes: “Hey, calmes-toi, Andreas…. The idea of Canada still moves most of us, except for the hardliners.”

Beagan arrives in British Columbia, at his island, as October is closing out and certainly there’s a bare, disappointed, autumnal feel to things. Vancouver is full of crass American movie-makers; the island – well, let’s just say that it’s a wet disappointment. There’s more too: it’s 1995, remember, and Quebec has just voted in its referendum, which Beagan takes as yet another reason to despair for the country.

The sum of the parts of Beagan’s journey add up to a conclusion that might come coldly: “Canada is no promised land,” Beagan decides. “It is not a place that rewards dreams,” but rather, “a land of many solitudes.” He even suspects it was Canada that killed his father: “the country wasn’t up to his faith in it.”

Where does that leave the wearied traveller? He understands, he says, that his roots aren’t “in a landscape or even in a country,” but rather in the memories he’s gathered with the help of his chorus from the hereafter.

Where does it leave us? Oddly, even with its autumn-sober ending, The Oatmeal Ark won’t leave you chilled. It’s not, perhaps, a book you’d want to rely on to map the way if you were crossing the country in a lapstrake canoe, but at the same time you’d be sadly underequipped if you didn’t have its richly revealing prism at hand to see your surroundings by.