To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Book
Notes
psychological instinct draws out the essentials
of character, the individualities of the
persons involved, from active field officers
to fading Ottawa social butterflies, from
Max Aitken to Harold Innis, but in such a
way that the book as a whole amounts to an
exploration in depth and with great empathy
of what the unprecedented experience
of the Great War did to Canadian society,
the strengths of nationality it developed,
and the potentialities it destroyed, G.W.
Ernest Hillen. The Way of a Boy. Penguin.
"Memory is, finally, all we own," says
Ernest Hillen as he ends his reminiscent
book, The Way of a Boy, and who can deny
it, especially when faced with such a fine
piece of recollective writing? Ernest Hillen
was a small boy when the Japanese on Java
took him and his family into their prison
camps, his father and eventually his elder
brother into one for men, his mother into a
series of steadily worsening camps for
women and children. It is a book that
exposes with a strangely detached frankness
the cruelties imposed by the Japanese
guards and officers, yet it is surprisingly
lacking in hatred. Hatred can spoil a book,
but Hillen has written a really good memoir
by reentering his childhood self and
showing the mixture of courage and loyalty
and cunning by which a surprising number
of people survived those appalling conditions.
It is one of the best memoirs I have
read in years, and should interest both historians
and also addicts of autobiography,
for here is not only a true story, but one
written with remarkable skill, G.W.
Clarence R. Bolt. Thomas Crosby and the
Tsimshian: Small Shoes for Feet Too Large. U
British Columbia P. $35.95. Among other
things, this is a study of the relationship
between the missionaries and their converts
on the Pacific Coast, and of the extent to
which those who are about to be converted
often precipitate the event. Clarence Bold
takes as his example the passionately evangelical
Methodist Thomas Crosby, who
went to Port Simpson at the call of those
Tsimshian Indians who had not joined the
famous Anglican missionary Duncan in his
religious Utopia of Metlakatla (where the
aim was to turn the Indians into model
Victorian working men). Duncan's success,
particularly in saving his people from the
smallpox epidemics of the time, had led the
Tsimshian who did not follow him to seek
an emotionally motivated Christianity that
would come nearer than low church
Anglicanism to their quasi-religious practices,
irradiated by inspiration and possession.
Crosby fitted their need, but only for
a while, since most of the missionaries—
and he among them—were working-class
Englishmen with their own urges to wield
power above their status in Victorian society,
and who did not have the political
standing or influence to deal with the great
problems of acculturation, particularly
those of land ownership. The strange mixture
of enthusiasm and cagey aloofness on
the part of the Native people is well evoked,
and Bolt develops one of a number of possible
explanations of the conversion enthusiasms
of the Pacific Coast. His research has
its flaws; he missed the most important
book on Duncan of Metlakatla, and other
key books on the native cultures of British
Columbia, but he contributes an unstereotypical
point of view that is plausible and
not demeaning, as so many academic
accounts are, to the native peoples, G.W.
David Neel. Our Chiefs and Elders. U
British Columbia P. $35.95. Our Chiefs and
Elders is a handsome book. It consists of
photographs of native chiefs and elders
from the West coast, taken by David Neel,
son of the fine carver, Ellen Neel, and statements
regarding the native past and present
by the sitters. If the portraits have a fault, it
is that they are too self-consciously posed.
Yet it might be said that posing, as
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