The Sojourn

By Alan Cumyn. McClelland & Stewart, 314 pp, $34.99, hardcover.

With The Sojourn, Ottawan Alan Cumyn has fashioned a virtuoso sonata of a First World War novel. The opening section—the allegro, if you like—introduces Ramsay Crome, a willful, romantic young private from Victoria who has signed up against his family’s wishes. We find him mud-slimed in the frontlines of Belgium, and The Sojourn is told first-person, present tense (Cumyn involves the reader as powerfully as possible; the smells are palpable) from the opening sentence: “It’s nighttime, endless night, and I can’t walk four steps without Johnson treading on my heels.”

Through this harrowing introduction, we meet the grunts of the Crome’s 7th Canadian Pioneers. They’re a decent bunch, despite the near-constant shelling, the hunger and lice, the half-buried corpses, the incompetent, selfish officers. It all seems familiar somehow, which is part of Cumyn’s plan: The Sojourn, a credible war novel in its own right, also borrows the clichés and set pieces of the genre to cement the grimy realism of its opening.

Which makes the middle third more disorienting, for both Crome and his readers. Temporary relief from the hell of Flanders arrives, deus ex machina, in the form of an unexpected furlough. Crome heads with due haste to London, quiet, civilized London, where he falls in love with Margaret, a cousin he’s never met.

Cumyn’s great ability rests in the tonal shift between the desperate, forceful push of the first section and the dreamy interlude (the adagio) that follows. Lost between the for-king-and-country valour of the trenches and England’s humanist detachment, Crome is no longer sure what he wants. Pacifist Margaret accuses him of pining for the fighting: “You and the rest of you, you wanted this war, and the very notion of peace pales beside it.” He disagrees, yet the remainder of the book sees him vexed by this conflict between patriotism and a dawning awareness of his position as nothing but a pawn.

Against the backdrop of war and its heroes, and the standard devices of an overbearing father and a devastatingly eccentric love interest (Margaret is a character flat enough to pin on the wall), Crome emerges, by contrast, in complex glory; his final choice is a moving testament to the imagination and endurance of the individual.

This review first appeared in the Georgia Straight on May 22, 2003