New Hamilton novel tells hard stories through prism of history

The fuel of events and historical context on which Terry Morgan's new novel runs could have been siphoned from the headlines of today.

Terror in Ukraine. Bigoted demagoguery stropping the blades of intolerance and nationalist frenzy.

Clashes between tradition and progress, collisions of polarized values, tearing apart the heart of families, generations.

Melting Pots and Tribal Enclaves," is set not in the 2020s but in the last century and starts 110 years ago. Visited in the book are moral failures even more colossal as our current ones - two world wars, genocide in Ukraine, the rise of Nazism.

What do the French say? Plus ca change . . . ." The more they stay the same. Very poor listeners, we seem always to be asking history, Could you repeat yourself?" And, of course, only too willing to oblige, history does, as the saying goes. We still don't listen.

Melting Pots and Tribal Enclaves" sprawls across half a century, from the troubling obstetrics of the First World War to the dawn of a new era in the mid-1960s, following the paths of two families over two generations across the Atlantic, as they ultimately stake out new lives in the promised land of . . . Hamilton.

For Terry, retired Hamilton English teacher (Glendale Secondary, among others), librarian and department head, the primary action and characters in his novel were siphoned from the well-thumbed pages of personal history.

As characters, his protagonists, Alina Dubinsky and Roy Evans, are based in part on his first wife and himself, and the parents of those two characters are based respectively on his original in-laws and on his own parents.

The larger, background narrative in this novel belongs to history itself, virtually a character in its own right - the geopolitical, social and cultural forces around which the characters so often must shape their behaviour.

Melting Pots and Tribal Enclaves" begins with a prologue spelling out the remarkable context of the Stelco strikes Stelco strikesof 1946. Terry calls the immediate postwar period this city's Golden Age," especially the portion dominated by that enormous labour action which tested our marrow and self-definition as a community, often setting neighbour against neighbour.

I've always read a lot of history," Terry, 82 (this is his first novel - watch out, Margaret Atwood," he says) tells me as he reflects on his approach to the novel. Even as an English teacher, I read history rather than novels."

If the personally-based narrative is as familiar as his own birthmarks, then almost equally accessible to his descriptive powers is the course of history in the novel, as he has read so widely.

After the Hamilton prologue the book starts in earnest with a wonderful set piece that has Michael Dubinsky, father of Alina, as a boy, gawking at the pageantry of a visit to Lvov in Galicia (Ukraine) by Emperor Franz Joseph in 1912. So much is contained here, the wheels of history lumbering into motion toward First World War and the wheels of family history along with it.

The novel carries us through both wars and simultaneously into Ukrainian history, through the famine and expropriation, as experienced by the Dubinskys. This is alternated with the story of Alice, Roy's mom, as she moves from Saskatchewan to be with her Welsh husband, Peter Evans.

These scenes, of Alice adapting to life on a Welsh farm, enduring hard work, the dreariest weather and even drearier in-laws, are some of the book's strongest. The hostility and intolerance of her mother-in-law and sister-in-law have a fable quality (Cinderella) and also illustrate in microcosm the dehumanization of the other," of the strange," that characterizes so much of the historical narrative.

I may cry," Alice tells Peter at one point in the novel, but I will not be beaten down."

When husband Peter leaves for the war, Alice returns to Canada with her children. He eventually rejoins her there.

This mirrors what happened in the author's life. He didn't meet his dad until he was almost school age. They didn't get along, he says.

But in his old age we reconciled," he tells me.

As this strand of the novel develops the horror in eastern Europe drives Michael Dubinsky and his family to Canada.

Of course, that's not the end of the story. Many of the Old World conflicts are imported into Canada, and struggles of class, assimilation, tribalism and changing values have to get worked through, which is so much the story of this country and of Hamilton, and much of it gets worked through over the battlefield of the children, Alina and Roy, who meet and fall in love.

Terry Morgan, who is a child of all this history and of these particular circumstances and of this city (he was on the championship Delta football team of 1954), has given us an important novel of other times that have many lessons for and parallels with our own.

It is at times unusual in style - a mix of historical exposition, memoir and family saga - but it really works.

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Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator.jmahoney@thespec.com