Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

account of the development of various
companies (e.g., Canadian Northern,
Grand Trunk Pacific, and Intercolonial)
which went into the mix to form the CNR
(the final act of incorporation came in
1923), the conglomerate company's subsequent
progress through the days of steam,
and the move (still lamented by some) to
dieselisation. While the text offers a nice
blend of technical and corporate history—
the main facts and figures are there, and
some mechanical matters are explained, for
the lay reader, in a tactfully unpatronising
way—it also provides more than a glimpse
of the human price paid, from the board
member to the track gang, in order to make
the system work. Further, they have succeeded
in doing this with some economy of
text. While there have been other significant
books on the history of the CNR (e.g.,
G.R. Stevens' splendid two-volume
Canadian National Railways [i960,1962],
Stevens' History of the Canadian National
Railways [1973], and Donald MacKay's The
Asian Dream [1986]), what enhances and
develops the text and makes this work by
MacKay and Perry particulary attractive is
the astonishingly generous provision of
black and white photographs, most of
which will be unfamiliar even to avid train
buffs. Text and picture link well, and the
illustrations (many of them superb examples
of photographic art in their own right)
offer that blend of fact and romance which
is, in fact, often the aim of the dedicated
photo-essay about railways. This is not,
though, a coffee-table or railway-fan production
but a serious attempt to make
intellectually/visually accessible to a potentially
wide audience an introduction to a
vital segment of Canada's past and present,
and the book succeeds happily. And given
the number of occasions when railways figure
in our poetry and prose, even those with
a more decidedly literary interest would do
well to give this volume some time.
The railways were, after all, at one time
the major and sometimes the only means
of getting supplies and people into and out
of remote communities. One area which
depended on such service is south-eastern
British Columbia, which became the home
for many of the Doukhobors who found
their way to Canada after fleeing Russia
because their pacifist views were, at best,
uncongenial to the Czarist regime. Settling
first in Saskatchewan, large numbers came
to B.C.'s Kootenay region seeking a peaceful
agricultural existence. Just as MacKay and
Perry offer a clear-eyed view of a transportation
system labouring to survive in a
world of mercurial economics and rapid
technological advance, Vi Plotnikoff provides
remarkable 1950's vintage portraits of
a group of people with deeply rooted traditions
and values, endeavouring to preserve
a spiritual and communal existence while
having to come increasingly into contact
with the secular and material forces of
western Canada, the margins often producing
a difficult social rip-tide which, at its
most extreme, prompted the reactions of
the Sons of Freedom and the forced seizure
and education of a number of Doukhobor
children at New Denver. Confrontation
always makes the news, unfortunately;
peaceful socialisation and productive coexistence,
characteristic of the majority of
the Doukhobor group, has been traditionally—and
regrettably—regarded as unremarkable.
Plotnikoff's Head Cook . .. reminds one
sharply of this error. There is nothing,
indeed, unremarkable about the lives of her
people nor her book as a whole: she offers
fourteen sensitive and touching fictional
accounts of their way of life—perhaps one
of the best sets of short stories to come out
of western Canada in the last decade. This
is fine short fiction—rooted in reality, in
what the writer really knows. Economical,
insightful, well-paced, full of characters
with wonderful individual voices (the
flavour of the Russian language is here,
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