Shop at Home with British Home Stores, 24-Studio Catalogue Website, Chums Clothing, Hooked On Phonics, Empire Stores Chapters, Canada . Buy Now Pay Later With Interest Free Credit | Prudential Home Insurance The Colony Of Unrequited Dreams Author: Wayne Johnston Trade Paperback Usually ships in 24 hours Delivery is subject to warehouse availability. Shipping delays may occur if we receive more orders than stock. Our Price: $22.00 You could save $2.20 (10%) with our iREWARDS Program Ordering is 100% secure . Spend $39 or more at chapters.indigo.ca and your order ships free!. ( Details ) Dimensions: 576 Pages, 5.188 x 8 in | ISBN: 0676972152 Published: September 1999 | Published by Vintage Canada Our customers who bought this item also bought: No Great Mischief (2001) Book ~ Alistair MacLeod Baltimore's Mansion (2000) Book ~ Wayne Johnston Mercy Among the Children (2001) Book ~ David Adams Richards A Fine Balance: Oprah's Book Club No. 44 (1997) Book ~ Rohinton Mistry Girl With A Pearl Earring A Novel (2001) Book ~ Tracy Chevalier chapters.indigo Review Joe Smallwood has defied all the odds, clawing his way up from obscurity to become Newfoundland’s first premier. His only problem is Sheilagh Fielding, a popular newspaper columnist and gifted satirist who casts a haunting shadow over Smallwood’s life and career. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is both a mystery -- and a love story --spanning five decades. From the Publisher • National bestseller • Winner of The 1999 Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction • Shortlisted for the 1998 Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and Rogers Communication Writers Trust Fiction Prize • One of The Globe and Mail ’s Top 100 Notable Books of 1998 and Critics’ Pick: One of the Year’s Top Ten Books • A Maclean’s Choice for Best Fiction from Fall, 1998 Wayne Johnston combines brilliant storytelling with unforgettable description, and gives us two of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction: Joe Smallwood, who claws his way from obscurity to become Newfoundland’s first premier; and Sheilagh Fielding, a popular newspaper columnist and gifted satirist who casts a haunting shadow over Smallwood’s life and career. A mystery and a love story spanning five decades, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is an epic portrait of relentless ambition from a novelist at the height of his powers. About the Author Wayne Johnston is the author of four previous novels, including The Divine Ryans , the film version of which will be released this fall. He was born and raised in Newfoundland and now lives in Toronto. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams has been published in the US and UK and is forthcoming in Germany and Holland. His first work of non-fiction, Baltimore’s Mansion is published by Knopf Canada. Tips for your Reading Group The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams —at once a mystery and a love story spanning five decades and an epic portrait of passion and ambition set against the beautiful, brutal landscape of Newfoundland. In this widely acclaimed novel Johnston has created two of the most memorable characters in recent fiction: Joey Smallwood, who claws his way up from poverty to become Newfoundland’s first premier; and Sheilagh Fielding, who renounces her father’s wealth to become a popular columnist and writer, a gifted satirist who casts a haunting shadow on Smallwood’s life and career. The two meet as children in school and grow to realize that their lives are irreversibly intertwined, bound together by a secret they don’t know they share. Smallwood, always on the make, torn between love of country and fear of failure, is as reluctant to trust the private truths of his heart as his rival and savior, Fielding-brilliant, hard-drinking, and unconventionally sexy. Their story ranges from small-town Newfoundland to New York City, from the harrowing ice floes of the seal hunt to the lavish drawing rooms of colonial governors, and combines erudition, comedy, and unflagging narrative brio in a manner reminiscent of John Irving and Charles Dickens. A tragicomic elegy for the "colony of unrequited dreams" that is Newfoundland, Wayne Johnston’s masterful tribute to a people and a place establishes him as a novelist who is as profound as he is funny, with an impeccable sense of the intersection where private lives and history collide. 1. 1) Both Joe and his father suffer from the fact that their last name adorns a large iron boot hanging at the entrance to the harbor, advertising the family shoe store. Why is the boot so oppressive that both Joe and his father sometimes dream about it? Why does Joe finally take it down? 2. 2) Joe is haunted by the sense of his own insignificance: "It seemed to me that unless I did something that historians thought was worth recording, it would be as if I had never lived, that all the histories in the world together formed one book, not to warrant inclusion in which was to have wasted one’s life" [p. 454]. Why does he feel this way? What is the relationship between the ambitions of Joe Smallwood and his paternal heritage of small-time shopkeeping, alcoholism, and failure? How do his experiences at Bishop Feild school affect his ideas about himself? 3. 3) Johnston has created the structure of the book by interspersing Joe Smallwood’s first-person narrative with excerpts from Fielding’s journal, her History of Newfoundland, and her "Field Day" newspaper columns. What is the effect, as you read, of the interplay of these parts? 4. 4) Smallwood’s conversion to socialism takes place after his haunting vision of the frozen bodies of the sealers who died on the ice. Would you say that his walk across the island to unionize the men is Smallwood’s most heroic act in the novel? How does the rest of his career compare with the scale of this exploit? 5. 5) Returning to Newfoundland after five years in New York, Joe says, "It was as if I saw, for a fleeting second, the place as it had been while I was away, and as it would be after I was gone, separate from me, not coloured by my past or my perceptions. . . . A kind of hurt surged up in my throat, a sorrow that seemed to have no object and no cause, which I tried to swallow down but couldn’t" [pp. 211-12]. Why is this such a painful moment for him? 6. 6) Johnston has given Joe Smallwood the role of protagonist and the main first-person narrative, but some reviewers have expressed the opinion that Sheilagh Fielding is a more compelling character. Is Fielding ultimately more admirable than Smallwood? Whose life story is more interesting? Joe Smallwood is not mentioned in Fielding’s History, which ends in 1923 when Sir Richard Squires is prime minister. Why does Fielding end her history there? 7. 7) Why does Smallwood’s marriage proposal to Fielding go awry? When he next sees her, she tells him with her customary irony that she has been "reduced to hermiting because you broke my heart" [p. 228]. How true is this statement? Why does Smallwood marry Clara Oates and not Fielding? 8. 8) Freezing to death on the Bonavista branch line, Smallwood imagines his own obituary [p. 225]. What makes this scene so touching and so comical? Joe is saved by Fielding, who here as at other crucial moments makes herself indispensable. Does Smallwood perform the same function in her life? Is their relationship, on the whole, reciprocal in terms of giving and receiving? 9. 9) Sir Richard Squires tells Joe, "Power is what you want, though I’ll never get you to admit it. You picked socialism because you thought it was your best way of getting ahead. . . . You’re not an artist, you’re not a scientist, you’re not an intellectual. All that’s left to you is politics" [p. 270]. How accurate is Sir Richard’s assessment of Joe’s character? Joe responds that "the distinguishing characteristic of the true socialist...was selflessness" [p. 271]. Do selflessness and self-interest necessarily conflict? 10. 10) Some Canadian readers have been troubled by the liberties that Wayne Johnston has taken with the life of Newfoundland’s first premier. Is the book more purely fictional, and therefore more purely enjoyable, for American readers, for whom Smallwood is not a known entity? It appears, for instance, that Johnston created the character of Fielding wholly from his own imagination. Why do you suppose he decided that Fielding was needed as a counterpart to Joe Smallwood? What would the novel have been like without the presence of Fielding? What are the particular complications and pleasures of fiction that is based on, but not entirely true to, historical reality? 11. 11) The mystery of the anonymous letter to The Morning Post is not solved until the end of the novel, and it keeps Smallwood in the dark about some of the motivations of Fielding’s character as well as her true feelings for him. How satisfying is the resolution of this issue? Does the revelation about Fielding’s father highlight aspects of her character, or explain in part why she has conducted her life as she has? 12. 12) Why does Joe bring Judge Prowse’s A History of Newfoundland with him to New York City? What is the symbolic significance of this book for various characters in the novel? 13. 13) Why does Johnston wait until late into the novel to reveal Fielding’s secret about what happened when she was sixteen? How does this revelation affect your understanding of Fielding’s character and her motivations up to this point? Would you say that Fielding is a selfless character? 14. 14) Is confederation a defeat for Newfoundland? Would it have been possible for such a bleak and economically unpromising land to survive as an independent nation? Was Smallwood right to think that, since socialism had failed, confederation was the only way to improve the lives of the outlanders? 15. 15) How would you compare the political ideals of the young Smallwood to those of the man who becomes premier of the island after confederation? Has his character changed? What about his core ethical beliefs? Why is he so susceptible to people like Valdmanis? 16. 16) Several reviews have commented on the skill with which Johnston has succeed in creating a novel that is reminiscent of the work of Charles Dickens. If you have read David Copperfield or Great Expectations, how does The Colony of Unrequited Dreams compare with them? What aspects of this book make it so compelling and so memorable? Suggestions for further reading Andrea Barrett, Ship Fever ; Sebastian Barry, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty ; Robertson Davies, Fifth Business ; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield and Great Expectations ; John Dos Passos, U.S.A. ; Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry ; Henry Fielding, Tom Jones ; Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore ; John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany ; Herman Melville, Moby Dick ; Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan ; Howard Norman, The Bird Artist ; E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News ; Graham Swift, Waterland . Review Quotes "My big fiction treat this year." -- Ann-Marie MacDonald, National Post "As absorbing as fiction can be -- and [from] one of our continent’s best writers." -- Kirkus Reviews "The scope of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is vast, its humour is quiet and assured, its mixture of fact and fiction is altogether bracing, and its writing is about as beautiful and as imaginative as writing gets these days." -- David Macfarlane, The Globe and Mail "A masterpiece -- Mr. Johnston has a genius in him -- and a haunting, unmitigated, uncanny vision and grace." -- Howard Norman, author of The Museum Guard and The Bird Artist "This splendid, entertaining novel is both a version of David Copperfield transposed to 20th-century Newfoundland, and an evocation of vanished ways of life.... Rich and complex, it offers Dickensian pleasures." -- Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal "A spellbinding, must-read tale.... Johnston’s authentic sense of place, history and romance are woven into a magical tapestry." -- Winnipeg Free Press "Wayne Johnston is a brilliant and accomplished writer and his Newfoundland -- boots and boats, rough politics and rough country, history and journalism -- during the wild Smallwood years is vivid and sharp." -- E. Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News "A classic historical novel... deeply felt and powerfully imagined [that] will make a permanent mark on our literature." -- The Toronto Star , Choice for Best Book of 1998 Reader Reviews Average Reader Review: Number of Reviews: 2 1. Joey Smallwood's Slow Rise Reviewer: Frank Young from North York Ontario (fwy@pathcom.com) Date: 9/16/2000 10:37:27 PM This is a really good book. Having said that, it must also be said that two of the major components of this novel are less than successful. The central "mystery" is ultimately of little consequence and one of the two main characters around whom this intricate, fascinating novel is wound is pretty shallow and ultimately uninteresting. However, the story of Joey Smallwood and his times and his native Newfoundland is incredibly well told. Gripping, funny, pathetic and full of adventures, Smallwood's life as portrayed in this book may not be 100% historically accurate, but man, is it ever entertaining. This novel; is so good, that despite a couple of major flaws, it is destined to be a classic of Canadian literature. 2. Glen from Edmonton Reviewer: Glen MacNeil from Edmonton, Alberta Date: 6/26/2000 1:47:04 AM The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston is a gripping read. He recounts a very believable story about one of the most famous characters in Newfoundland's history. He does this by highlighting Joey Smallwood's relationship with the ubiquitous Fielding while at the same time reminding us of Smallwood's family and his roots. It illustrates how closely all aspects of life are linked. Through Smallwood, we are shown how persistence and the desire to never disappear can be interesting ingredients for life and can result in longevity. It is a must read for anyone who likes to cheer for the underdog. 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