Baltimore’s Mansion: A Memoir

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Description

In this loving memoir Wayne Johnston returns to Newfoundland-the people, the place, the politics-and illuminates his circle of relatives’s story with the entire power and drama he brought to his magnificent novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

Descendents of the Irish who settled in Ferryland, Lord Baltimore’s Catholic colony in Newfoundland, the Johnstons “went from being sea-fearing farmers to sea-faring fishermen.” Every generation resolves to escape the hardships of life at sea, but their connection to this fantastically beautiful but harsh land is as eternal as the rugged shoreline, and the separations that result between generations is also as inevitable as the winters they endure. Unfulfilled dreams haunt this circle of relatives history and make Baltimore’s Mansion a thrilling and captivating book.
In this forceful, complex memoir, Wayne Johnston returns to the setting of his 1999 novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Johnston doesn’t just come from Newfoundland, remotest of Canada’s provinces; he comes from the Avalon Peninsula, the most isolated portion of Newfoundland (and at a loss for words in young Wayne’s boyish imaginings with the mythical Avalon, where King Arthur sailed to be healed of mortal wounds). It is an apt metaphor for a land that “used to be the edge of the known world, and looked it.” Avalon’s natives fiercely resented the 1948 referendum that joined Newfoundland to the Canadian Confederation–especially Johnston’s father, the memoir’s central character, who keens for lost independence in a manner highly paying homage to Stephen Dedalus’s father in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Indeed, parallels with Ireland are evident all the way through, not just because the Johnstons are descended from Irish immigrants but because the Newfoundlanders exhibit a similar passionate insularity and zest for feuding among themselves. Johnston’s muscular, plainspoken prose bears little resemblance to that of James Joyce, but his themes of exile and loss, loyalty and betrayal, and an ancient culture’s ambivalent relationship with modernity resonate with the great author’s most urgent concerns. –Wendy Smith

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