The best fun in True Patriot Love comes in the book’s first third. George Munro Grant was a Nova Scotian Presbyterian clergyman, a terrific preacher, whose crowning achievement was to make Queen’s University a first-rank institution as its principal from 1877 until his death in 1902. Before then, though, his gift for expressing a compelling vision of Canada made him a useful friend of prime ministers, and of Sandford Fleming, the legendary engineer who oversaw the building of the transcontinental railway.
It was with Fleming that Grant crossed Canada in 1872, the trip Grant recounted in Ocean to Ocean. Ignatieff’s retells the tale with verve. He revels especially in imagining Grant and Fleming crossing the Prairies on horseback in the last days before the railroad. “It’s fair to say,” he writes, “that those long days on the trail, sometimes breaking into a gallop to run after birds, sometimes chasing each other, other times letting the reins free, so that they could daydream, were the happiest moments of my great-grandfather’s life.”
Although Grant is every inch the Victorian, Ignatieff finds much to admire from a twenty-first century progressive’s perspective. Grant sided with the French in the Manitoba schools crisis, and broadly held that “a people can be truly united only when great minorities do not feel themselves treated with injustice.” Arriving in frontier Kamloops in 1872, Grant noted with disapproval the bigotry against the Chinese, praising them as “cleanly, orderly, patient, industrious and above all cheap.”
When Ignatieff’s moves on to consider his maternal grandfather, William Grant, he lacks the compelling centerpiece of an epic journey. The defining event of this life, of this generation, was the First World War. A promising historian who had lectured at Oxford, Grant returned to Canada after the war to run UCC, and write a high school history textbook. Ignatieff uses his life mainly to meditate on the mindset of Canadians who believed their country had come of age on the Western Front.
By the time of George Grant, brother of Ignatieff’s mother Alison, the family had evidently internalized and even mythologized its sense of purpose. “He always said,” Ignatieff writes, “that it was his mother who turned the vice of family expectation, who imbued him with a sense that he had to measure up to ‘the ancestors.’”
But George Grant’s particular way of relieving the pressure of the vice—by becoming Canada’s most noted intellectual pessimist—hardly meets with his nephew’s approval. “He gave up on the country. He should not have done,” Ignatieff writes. “The country is not done. The story has only just begun. There is so much more to tell, so much more to do.”
A sound-bite cadence has seeped into Ignatieff’s prose here. Yet on the very same page his writer’s craft reasserts itself when he describes visiting his famous uncle in 1983, finding him a “great shambling patriarch with a straggly beard, a huge laugh that revealed a frightful set of crooked an stained teeth.”
Ignatieff is often at his best with physical description. But he’s not just a good set of eyes. Remembering how family demons plagued George Grant into old age, Ignateiff discovers that this pain binds him to his uncle in a “family tradition” that’s far from benign. “A tradition,” Ignatieff reflects, “is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge that define and shape a whole life, his and mine.”
He doesn’t let us in on exactly what “fierce and unrequited longings” shape his own life. Maybe they have something to do with his bid to become prime minister. One can only imagine the agonies Liberal party operatives would now be suffering if their leader had unguardedly followed this line of thought.
Those party pros will undoubtedly be hoping readers skip ahead to his final chapter, in which Ignatieff recounts how, with his wife Zsuszanna, he retraced the Western portion of his great-grandfather’s cross-Canada journey. In this travelogue, their rental car takes the place of the horses and canoes of the original.
Behind the wheel, Ignatieff adopts the requisite sunny outlook of era when the word “hope” is synonymous with successful politicking. Even seeing the slow death of Prairie whistle-stop towns—the culture created by the railway Grant and Fleming championed—doesn’t get him down. “The Canada George Munro Grant had dreamed of was passing away,” he admits, “but a new economy was taking shape in the downtown universities and research institutes, the law firms and the business parks.”
Later he rides the West Edmonton Mall’s water slides!
By this time, Michael and Zsusanna have set themselves the jolly task of finding the best pie to be had at the highway eateries. Any further musing on the problematic nature of patriotism seems pretty much out of the question. The writing has turned too slight to lug around the burden of the Grant legacy.
