The Navigator of New York : A Novel
- Book Review,
by WAYNE JOHNSTON
From Publishers Weekly
The race to get to the North Pole frames a young explorer's effort to unearth his family history in Johnston's latest, a captivating narrative that delves into both the noble and the seedier aspects of the human need to discover and explore. Devlin Stead is the orphaned protagonist raised by his aunt and uncle in Newfoundland after his physician father dies in a polar expedition under the aegis of Robert Edwin Peary and Dr. Frederick Cook. The boy's sheltered existence is shattered when he receives a series of letters from Cook that reveal the explorer-who had committed an indiscretion with Devlin's mother-to be the boy's real father. Cook invites Devlin to New York, where he takes him under his wing and makes him his assistant. Their strange relationship culminates when father and son journey to Greenland to rescue the stubborn Peary, who has become stranded while trying to reach the pole and refuses to give up and return. Devlin then becomes deeply involved in Cook's effort to beat Peary to the pole, participating in Cook's infamous 1908 attempt that was decried as a hoax. Johnston (The Colony of Unrequited Dreams; Baltimore's Mansion, etc.) occasionally gets overly caught up in the details of Devlin's murky personal history yet delivers a satisfying character study, and the polar explorations generate considerable narrative tension when the family subplot flattens out. Johnston's ability to illuminate historical settings and situations continues to grow with each book, and this powerful effort is his best to date.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
As with Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston draws on historical events to build his new novel. A fierce duel was waged during the years 1907-09 between Adm. Robert Peary and Dr. Frederick Cook, each claiming to have been the first to reach the North Pole. Against the backdrop of this dispute, Johnston tells the story of a lonely Newfoundland boy named Devlin Stead who grows up under a shadow because his parents reputedly committed suicide. As Devlin observes, "I could think of no greater thing than to be an explorer, the epitome of my most cherished belief, which was that a man's fate was not determined by the past." In fact, Devlin's fate is much in thrall to the past. The thrill of polar exploration, the beauty and terror of glaciers, and the horror of the long Arctic nights are splendidly evoked. The secrets of Devlin's parents are slowly revealed, adding intrigue and suspense to the last two-thirds of the book. For all collections of serious fiction.Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NYCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Johnston's beautiful, evocative novel opens in Newfoundland at the end of the nineteenth century. Devlin Stead's father, Francis, has abandoned his family to become an Arctic explorer, and his mother has drowned under mysterious circumstances, leaving Devlin in the care of his aunt and uncle. Francis disappears on a trip to Greenland, and it seems Devlin is indeed an orphan. While his aunt Daphne dotes on him, his uncle Edward wants nothing to do with Devlin, until one day when he mysteriously summons Devlin to his office. There he gives Devlin a letter from Dr. Frederick Cook, an explorer who was with Devlin's father on the mission during which he disappeared. In the letter, Cook reveals a surprising secret about Devlin's parents. Cook continues to correspond with Devlin, until Devlin turns 20 and determines to go to New York and seek out Cook. Cook welcomes him, and Devlin becomes his apprentice. Cook's rival, Robert Peary, is determined to be the first to get to the North Pole, and Cook is equally as resolved to beat him. He draws Devlin into his obsessive quest, all the time revealing more and more to Devlin about his family. Johnston is an accomplished storyteller, with a gift for both description and character, which he uses masterfully here. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Johnston’s turn-of-the-last-century New York is moodily evocative, although [his] Arctic is even more engrossing and beautifully drawn…. This is a part of the world where even the Eskimos cry when winter returns…. ‘There was no time in this place where all meridians met,’ as Devlin rhapsodizes -- a young man finally embarking on his terrifying, heady journey into life.” -- The New York Times Book Review
“Beautiful [and] evocative…. Johnston is an accomplished storyteller, with a gift for both description and character, which he uses masterfully here.” -- Booklist
“A captivating narrative that delves into both the noble and the seedier aspects of the human need to discover and explore…. The polar expeditions generate considerable narrative tension…. Johnston’s ability to illuminate historical settings and situations continues to grow with each book, and this powerful effort is his best to date.” -- Publisher's Weekly
“Navigator is generously stuffed with crisp writing, rich characterizations, and haunting descriptions of the harsh beauty of the Arctic…. Marginally less wonderful, then, than The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1991). But all that means is that it’s merely better than about 90 percent of most contemporary fiction.” -- Kirkus Reviews, starred
"Readers have been wondering whether Johnston could possibly top (or even equal) his splendid fictional saga of Joey Smallwood, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. The answer is a slightly qualified yes. There is the same magical blend of fact and imagination, the same compelling drive to use fiction to answer the questions left unanswered by the historical record, and the same stylistic brilliance that can turn a description of icebergs into a sensory adventure rarely achieved in the pages of a modern novel." -- Bronwyn Drainie, Quill and Quire
“This passion for exploration and being the first to reach remote, unexplored parts of the world illuminates this enthralling book…. Johnston has created a powerful novel that portrays the romance, wonderment and deprivation of Arctic exploration, while at the same time capturing the taut, emotional intensity of a lonely, misunderstood young man at the core of the story…. Johnston masterfully conjures up a cast of characters…whose tragic story has a depth and scope which propels the reader towards a fascinating conclusion.” -- Karen Shewbridge, Dailies (St. John’s)
Praise for Wayne Johnston:
“The Colony of Unrequited Dreams makes Wayne Johnston one of those formidable Canadians, like Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood, that Americans simply can’t ignore.” -- Newsday
“[A] prodigiously talented author. . . . Wayne Johnston is well on his way to becoming the most distinctive talent this country has produced since Mordecai Richler.” -- The Globe and Mail
“Baltimore’s Mansion [is] a masterpiece of creative non-fiction.” -- National Post
“The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is a classic historical novel [that] will make a permanent mark on our literature.” -- The Toronto Star
“Mesmerizing.” -- The New York Times Book Review
“Why I love reading Wayne Johnston: The reader goes skittering through Wayne Johnston’s novels, driven inexorably forward on the force of his characters, on the power of his wit. Unlike most recent bestselling novels that are remembered for the plane flight and then promptly forgotten, Wayne’s stories have characters who move in and take up permanent residence.” -- Mary Walsh
“His books are beautifully written, among the funniest I’ve ever read, yet somehow at the same time among the most poignant and moving.” -- Annie Dillard
Review
?Johnston?s turn-of-the-last-century New York is moodily evocative, although [his] Arctic is even more engrossing and beautifully drawn?. This is a part of the world where even the Eskimos cry when winter returns?. ?There was no time in this place where all meridians met,? as Devlin rhapsodizes -- a young man finally embarking on his terrifying, heady journey into life.? -- The New York Times Book Review
?Beautiful [and] evocative?. Johnston is an accomplished storyteller, with a gift for both description and character, which he uses masterfully here.? -- Booklist
?A captivating narrative that delves into both the noble and the seedier aspects of the human need to discover and explore?. The polar expeditions generate considerable narrative tension?. Johnston?s ability to illuminate historical settings and situations continues to grow with each book, and this powerful effort is his best to date.? -- Publisher's Weekly
?Navigator is generously stuffed with crisp writing, rich characterizations, and haunting descriptions of the harsh beauty of the Arctic?. Marginally less wonderful, then, than The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1991). But all that means is that it?s merely better than about 90 percent of most contemporary fiction.? -- Kirkus Reviews, starred
"Readers have been wondering whether Johnston could possibly top (or even equal) his splendid fictional saga of Joey Smallwood, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. The answer is a slightly qualified yes. There is the same magical blend of fact and imagination, the same compelling drive to use fiction to answer the questions left unanswered by the historical record, and the same stylistic brilliance that can turn a description of icebergs into a sensory adventure rarely achieved in the pages of a modern novel." -- Bronwyn Drainie, Quill and Quire
?This passion for exploration and being the first to reach remote, unexplored parts of the world illuminates this enthralling book?. Johnston has created a powerful novel that portrays the romance, wonderment and deprivation of Arctic exploration, while at the same time capturing the taut, emotional intensity of a lonely, misunderstood young man at the core of the story?. Johnston masterfully conjures up a cast of characters?whose tragic story has a depth and scope which propels the reader towards a fascinating conclusion.? -- Karen Shewbridge, Dailies (St. John?s)
Praise for Wayne Johnston:
?The Colony of Unrequited Dreams makes Wayne Johnston one of those formidable Canadians, like Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood, that Americans simply can?t ignore.? -- Newsday
?[A] prodigiously talented author. . . . Wayne Johnston is well on his way to becoming the most distinctive talent this country has produced since Mordecai Richler.? -- The Globe and Mail
?Baltimore?s Mansion [is] a masterpiece of creative non-fiction.? -- National Post
?The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is a classic historical novel [that] will make a permanent mark on our literature.? -- The Toronto Star
?Mesmerizing.? -- The New York Times Book Review
?Why I love reading Wayne Johnston: The reader goes skittering through Wayne Johnston?s novels, driven inexorably forward on the force of his characters, on the power of his wit. Unlike most recent bestselling novels that are remembered for the plane flight and then promptly forgotten, Wayne?s stories have characters who move in and take up permanent residence.? -- Mary Walsh
?His books are beautifully written, among the funniest I?ve ever read, yet somehow at the same time among the most poignant and moving.? -- Annie Dillard
Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (“brilliant and accomplished” -- Annie Proulx), an epic novel of one man’s quest for the secret of his origins that ranges from the bustling streets of nineteenth-century New York to the remotest regions of the Arctic.
As a young child in St. John’s, Devlin Stead and his mother, Amelia, are suddenly abandoned by his father, Dr. Francis Stead, who flees north to practise medicine among the Eskimos. Distraught by his absence, Amelia throws herself into the icy ocean from Signal Hill. Rather than return home, his father joins the American Lieutenant Peary on one of his attempts to reach the North Pole, but wanders off from camp one night and is never seen again. Now orphaned, Devlin grows up an outcast and a loner, attended to by his devoted aunt Daphne and his taciturn physician uncle.
And then one day his uncle summons Devlin to his office and hands him an extraordinary letter from the explorer, Dr. Frederick Cook -- the first of several that will change everything Devlin thought he knew about himself. He will sail to New York to become Dr. Cook’s protégé, to be introduced into society, and eventually to accompany him on his race to reach the Pole before his arch-rival Peary. It is in Manhattan that Devlin falls in love with a young woman with an astonishing family connection to Amelia.
In The Navigator of New York Wayne Johnston’s descriptions of place -- whether of the frozen Arctic wastes or the city of New York, bursting with the energy of a metropolis about to become the capital city of the globe -- evoke an extraordinary physicality and conviction. A remarkable achievement that seamlessly weaves fact and fabrication, it continues the masterful reinvention of the historical novel Wayne Johnston began with his lavishly praised The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Inside Flap
Wayne Johnston’s breakthrough epic novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams was published in several countries and given high praise from the critics. It earned him nominations for the highest fiction prizes in Canada and was a national bestseller. His American editor said he hadn’t found such an exciting author since he discovered Don DeLillo. Johnston, who has been writing fiction for two decades, launched his next and sixth novel across the English-speaking world to great anticipation.
The Navigator of New York is set against the background of the tumultuous rivalry between Lieutenant Peary and Dr. Cook to get to the North Pole at the beginning of the 20th century. It is also the story of a young man’s quest for his origins, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to the bustling streets of New York, and the remotest regions of the Arctic.
Devlin Stead’s father, an Arctic explorer, stops returning home at the end of his voyages and announces he is moving to New York, as “New York is to explorers what Paris is to artists”; eventually he is declared missing from an expedition. His mother meets an untimely death by drowning shortly after. Young Devlin, who barely remembers either of them, lives contently in the care of his affectionate aunt and indifferent uncle, until taunts from a bullying fellow schoolboy reveal dark truths underlying the bare facts he knows about his family. A rhyme circulated around St. John’s further isolates Devlin, always seen as an odd child who had inherited his parents’ madness and would likely meet a similar fate.
Devlin, who has always learned about his father through newspaper reports, now finds other people’s accounts of his parents are continually altering his view of his parents. Then strange secret letters start to arrive, exciting his imagination with the unanticipated notion that his life might contain the possibility of adventure. Nothing is what it once seemed. Suddenly a chance to take his own place in the world is offered, giving him courage and a newfound zest for discovery. “It was life as I would live it unless I went exploring that I dreaded.”
Caught up in the mystery of who his parents really were, and anxious to leave behind the image of ‘the Stead boy’, at the age of twenty Devlin sails, carrying only a doctor’s bag, to a New York that is bursting with frenzied energy and about to become the capital city of the globe; where every day inventors file for new patents and three thousand new strangers enter the city, a city that already looks ancient although taller buildings are constructed constantly. There he will become protégé to Dr. Cook, who is restlessly preparing for his next expedition, be introduced into the society that makes such ventures possible, and eventually accompany Cook on his epic race to reach the Pole before the arch-rival Peary. This trip will plunge Devlin into worldwide controversy -- and decide his fate.
Wayne Johnston has harnessed the scope, energy and inventiveness of the nineteenth century novel and encapsulated it in the haunting and eloquent voice of his hero. His descriptions of place, whether of the frozen Arctic wastes or the superabundant and teeming New York, have extraordinary physicality and conviction, recreating a time when the wide world seemed to be there for the taking. An extraordinary achievement that seamlessly weaves fact and fabrication, it continues the masterful reinvention of the historical novel Wayne Johnston began with The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.
From the Back Cover
Praise for Wayne Johnston:
“The Colony of Unrequited Dreams makes Wayne Johnston one of those formidable Canadians, like Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood, that Americans simply can’t ignore.” -- Newsday
“[A] prodigiously talented author. . . . Wayne Johnston is well on his way to becoming the most distinctive talent this country has produced since Mordecai Richler.” -- The Globe and Mail
“Baltimore’s Mansion [is] a masterpiece of creative non-fiction.” -- National Post
“The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is a classic historical novel [that] will make a permanent mark on our literature.” -- The Toronto Star
“Mesmerizing.” -- The New York Times Book Review
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Wayne Johnston was born in Newfoundland in 1958 and grew up in Goulds, a small community a few miles south of St. John's. When he was a boy, he couldn’t imagine a world beyond the island. “The only outside world I ever saw was on television, and I didn’t really even believe that world existed.” People were still divided over the Confederation with Canada, which had happened only in 1949. His family had a habit of moving around to different neighbourhoods and his schooling was ‘hyper-Catholic’, traits which would feature in his autobiographical first novel.
He graduated with a BA (Hons) in English from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and worked from 1979 to 1981 as a reporter at the St. John's Daily News. Being a reporter was a crash course in how society works, but he realized he didn’t want it as a career. “I’m not that outgoing of a person and you have to be in order to be a good reporter.” He moved away from Newfoundland, firstly to Ottawa, and took up the writing of fiction full-time. In 1983 he graduated with an MA from the University of New Brunswick. His first book, The Story of Bobby O’Malley, was published shortly after, and won the W.H.Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. He followed this success two years later with The Time of Their Lives, which won the Canadian Authors' Association Award for Most Promising Young Writer.
His third novel, The Divine Ryans, again a portrait of Irish Catholic Newfoundland, centres on a nine-year-old hockey fanatic, whose father dies and whose family goes to live with relatives who once had money but are fast declining. Time Out has called it “achingly funny, needle sharp…with heart, soul and brains”. One of Johnston’s most comic novels, it earned him the title of ‘the Roddy Doyle of Canada’. The Divine Ryans won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and has been adapted into a film starring Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite. Johnston wrote the screenplay himself for this and also for the adaptation of his next novel, Human Amusements, also optioned for film.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston’s fifth novel, in 1998 was shortlisted for the most prestigious fiction awards in Canada, the Governor General's Award and the Giller Prize, the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and the Rogers Communication Writers Trust Fiction Prize; it won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction. A glowing New York Times Book Review cover story caused the book to leap to the upper ranks of the Amazon.com top 100 selling books of the day. It has been called a ‘Dickensian romp of a novel’, which uses the career of Newfoundland's first premier to create a love story and a tragi-comic elegy to an impossible country.
Published across North America and Europe in several languages, the novel caused some controversy in Canada among those who recalled the real Joey Smallwood, a man who was hated by many Newfoundlanders, including Johnston’s own family, for bringing the island into Canada. Although his strongly anti-confederate family could barely bring themselves to mention Smallwood’s name, Johnston read a biography of the politician when he was 14.
Johnston considered carefully the different ways of establishing ‘fictional/historical plausibility’ in the novel. Re-reading Don Delillo's novel Libra, he observed how “Delillo gave himself the freedom to invent scenes, incidents, conversations as long as they seemed plausible within the fictional world that he created.” He also considered Salman Rushdie’s Midnight's Children, where, in spite of the magic realism, India still gains independence in 1948, and political figures are elected or assassinated under the same circumstances as their real-life counterparts. He decided he would not change or omit anything that was publicly known. “I would fill in the historical record in a way that could have been true, and flesh out and dramatize events that, though publicly known, were not recorded in detail. Most importantly, I would invent for Smallwood a lover/nemesis (Sheilagh Fielding) who could have existed (but didn't) and wove her and Smallwood's story into the history of Newfoundland. This would be my plausibility contract with the reader.”
In 1999 he published Baltimore's Mansion, his first non-fiction book, a family memoir that also became a national bestseller and won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Johnston uses the stories of his own childhood and his father and grandfather to cast light on Newfoundland’s struggle over relinquishing independence in 1949. A National Post reviewer concluded that it was a ‘non-fiction novel’ drawing on all Johnston’s narrative powers to “shape the materials of real life into a work of astonishing beauty and power”. In another review, Quill and Quire said “I began to smell the smells, hear the lilt, and experience a sense of the fierce attachment Newfoundlanders feel to their home province no matter where they live,” commenting that Newfoundland geography, history and culture permeates Johnston’s books.
Johnston has lived in Toronto since 1989, although he has to date written exclusively about Newfoundland. “I couldn't write about the island while I was there,” he says. “Life was too immediate. I was too inundated by the place and its details. I'd write about something and see it when I walked across the street the next day.” A “benign homesickness” has become a kind of fuel for writing about the island. He talks of Newfoundland as being too “overwhelmingly beautiful and substantial” to capture. To write with any kind of objectivity, "I need distance to get that sense of what is important and what is significant and what is not."
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
In 1881, Aunt Daphne said, not long after my first birthday, my father told the family that he had signed on with the Hopedale Mission, which was run by Moravians to improve the lives of Eskimos in Labrador. His plan, for the next six months, was to travel the coast of Labrador as an outport doctor. He said that no matter what, he would always be an Anglican. But it was his becoming a fool, not a Moravian, that most concerned his family.
In what little time they had before he was due to leave, they, my mother and the Steads, including Edward, tried to talk him out of it. They could not counter his reasons for going, for he gave none. He would not counter the reasons they gave for why he should stay, instead meeting their every argument with silence. It would be disgraceful, Mother Stead told him; him off most of the time like the men who worked the boats, except that they at least sent home for the upkeep of their families what little money they didn’t spend on booze. This was not how a man born into a family of standing, and married into one, should conduct himself. Sometimes, on the invitation of Mother Stead, a minister would come by and join them in dressing down my father. He endured it all in silence for a while, then excused himself and went upstairs to his study. It was as though he was already gone, already remote from us.
Perhaps the idea to become an explorer occurred to him only after he became an outport doctor. Or he might have met explorers or heard about some while travelling in Labrador. I’m not sure.
At any rate, he had been with the Hopedale Mission just over a year, was at home after his second six-month stint, when he answered an ad he saw in an American newspaper. Applying for the position of ship’s doctor on his first polar expedition, he wrote: “I have for several years now been pursuing an occupation that required arduous travel to remote places and long stretches of time away from home.” Several years, not one. He said that for would-be expeditionaries, such embellishments were commonplace.
He signed on with his first expedition in 1882. A ship from Boston bound for what he simply called “the North” put in at St. John’s to take him on.
First a missionary, now an explorer. And him with a wife and a two-year-old son, and a brother whose lifetime partner he had pledged to be. My aunt’s husband, my uncle Edward.
Father Stead had been a doctor, and it was his wish, which they obliged, that his two sons “share a shingle” with him. My father, older by a year, deferred his acceptance at Edinburgh so that he and Uncle Edward could enrol together. The brothers Stead came back the Doctors Stead in 1876. In St. John’s, Anglicans went to Anglican doctors, whose numbers swelled to nine after the return home of Edward and my father. On the family shingle were listed one-third of the Anglican doctors in the city. It read, “Dr. A. Stead, Dr. F. Stead and Dr. E. Stead, General Practitioners and Surgeons,” as if Stead was not a name, but the initials of some credential they had all earned, some society of physicians to which all of them had been admitted.
Three years after their graduation from Edinburgh, Father Stead died, but the shingle was not altered. Until his death, the two brothers had shared a waiting room, but afterwards my father moved into his father’s surgery, across the hall. From the door that had borne both brothers’ names, my father’s was removed. It was necessary to make only one small change to the green-frosted window of grandfather’s door: the intial A was removed and the initial F put in its place. F for Francis.
Even without Father Stead, the family practice thrived. When asked who their doctor was, people said “the Steads,” as if my father and Edward did everything in tandem: examinations, diagnoses, treatments. When they arrived at reception, new patients were not asked which of the brothers they wished to see -- nor, in most cases, did they arrive with their minds made up. Patients were assigned on an alternating basis. To swear by one of the brothers Stead was to swear by the other.
But with the departure of my grandfather, the Steads were no longer the Steads, and for a while the practice faltered. And no wonder, Edward said, what with one of them having gone off, apparently preferring first the company of Eskimos and Moravians to that of his own kind, and now the profession of nursemaid to a boatload of social misfits to that of doctor. If one of them would do that, what might the other do?
The family itself dropped a notch in the estimation of its peers. It was as if some latent flaw in the Stead character had shown itself at last. My father’s patients did not go across the hall to Edward. They went to other doctors. Some of Edward’s patients did likewise. He had no choice but to accept new ones from a lower social circle.
My father, in letters home, insisted that he would take up his practice again one day. He promised Edward he would pay him the rent that his premises would have fetched from another doctor, but he was unable to make good on the promise, having forsaken all income.
Rather than find another partner, rather than take down the family shingle and replace it with one that bore a stranger’s name, Edward left my father’s office, and everything in it, exactly as it was.
That door. The door of the doctor who was never in but which still bore his name. It must have seemed to his patients that Edward was caught up in some unreasonably protracted period of mourning for his absent brother whose effects he could not bear to rearrange, let alone part with. Every day that door, his brother’s name, the frosted dark green glass bearing all the letters his did except for one. He could not come or go and not be prompted by that door to think of Francis.
The expedition “to the North” he said, immeasurably improved the map of the world, adding to it three small, unpopulated islands.
Soon, my father’s life was measured out in expeditions. When he came back from one, it was weeks before he no longer had to ask what month or what day of the week it was. He would go to his office, turn upside down the stack of newspapers left there for him by Edward and read about what had happened in the world while he was absent from it. He searched out what had been written about the expeditions he had served on, the records they had set. As my father had yet to command an expedition, none of these records was attributed to him. Rarely, these records were some “first” or “farthest.” But most of them were records of endurance, feats made necessary by catastrophes, blunders, mishaps. Declaring a record was usually a way of putting the best face on failure. “First to winter north of latitude . . .” was a euphemism for “Polar party stranded for months after ship trapped in ice off Greenland.”
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