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Defining Canada’s Place in the World

d leonard freeston’s new book The Sixth Extinction features a maniacal billionaire who is hellbent on saving the seeds of as many animal and plant species as possible. While writing the book, freeston (lower casing is intentional) looked at Canada’s place in the world of international espionage. Here’s what he had to say:

At the risk of sounding preachy, smug and thoroughly self-serving, considering that Rohinton Mistry, Barbara Gowdy, Margaret Atwood et al have little or nothing to learn from me, there’s a small point which I feel ought to be magnified and examined.

Several people have noted that with The Sixth Extinction I’ve written a novel which places Canada at the nexus of global affairs. I must confess that I was at first underwhelmed by this piece of news. It was a simple thriller, end of story. When further informed that this was something of a rarity, however, I began to pay a bit more attention.  Something that had come naturally to me might actually transcend the merely antic.

I made enquiries, ending up with various literati, my agent and my publicist. It seems that I was, indeed, a member of a rather small group. There were Richard Rohmer and a few others. Very few.

Observation: as useful and enlightening as the probing of all things Canadian has been in the past, it’s about time more writers took the plunge and engaged our country in a dialectic with other nations.

Canada is, in a literary sense, a bit like a patient who’s spent his entire life in doctors’ offices. It’s been poked and prodded hundreds of thousands of times, even having endured endless colonoscopies. The vast majority of its relationships have been with earnest and mercilessly thorough physicians. Consequently, we have a proliferation of small, “atmospheric” novels with titles like The South Saskatoon Sewing Circle.

Perhaps, as a thriller writer, I’m unfairly sermonizing from my own particular strength, and the possibilities inherent in the genre I’ve chosen, but I suggest that the patient, presently prime and primed, become more often an agent in the outside world. Canada’s place within Canada is now secure, thanks to scores of literary beacons such as Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler and Alice Munro. And it’s certainly not absent from the international literary map. What’s overdue is imaginative (or imagined) interchanges between Canada and other nations – and I don’t just mean its inferiority complex vis-à-vis the United States or Britain.

I daren’t advocate that other fiction writers necessarily place Canada in the eye of the storm, as I do in The Sixth Extinction, but it would be fit and timely if one of the planet’s oldest and most stable democracies were portrayed as an active player on the world stage. One doesn’t have to indulge in the nationalistic flamboyance of a Tom Clancy or Ian Fleming to define Canada’s place in the world. To acknowledge that Canada actually exists as more than a large pink splotch on the world map might be just enough.

Those who object that all this amounts to geopolitical fantasy might remember that life is the garden that art has sown.

© 2011 Defining Canada.