Baltimore's Mansion [Hardcover]

Wayne Johnston (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 16, 2000

The acclaimed author of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams introduces us to the Johnstons of Newfoundland in an intimate, captivating memoir of three generations of fathers and sons.

The New York Times called Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams "an eventful, character-rich book...a brilliant and bravura literary performance."  His marvelous new memoir, Baltimore's Mansion, is equally impressive, filled with heart-stopping descriptions, a cast of stubborn, acerbic, yet entirely irresistible family members, and an evocation of time and place reminiscent of his best fiction.

Charlie Johnston is the famed blacksmith of Ferryland, a Catholic colony founded by Lord Baltimore in the 1620s on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland.  For his prowess at the forge, he is considered as necessary as a parish priest at local weddings.  But he must spend the first cold hours of every workday fishing at sea with his sons, one of whom, the author's father, Arthur, vows that as an adult he will never look to the sea for his livelihood.

In the heady months leading to the referendum that results in Newfoundland being "inducted" into Canada, Art leaves the island for college and an eventual career with Canadian Fisheries, studying and regulating a livelihood he and his father once pursued.  He parts on mysterious terms with Charlie, who dies while he's away, and Art is plunged into a lifelong battle with the personal demons that haunted the end of their relationship.  Years later, Wayne prepares to leave at the same age Art was when he said good-bye to Charlie, and old patterns threaten to repeat themselves.

At times a harrowing tale of trails in the darkness, of grand desolation and dangerous coasts, Baltimore's Mansion speaks to us all about the hardships, blessings, and power of family relationships, of leaving home and returning.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this forceful, complex memoir, Wayne Johnston returns to the setting of his 1999 novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Johnston doesn't just come from Newfoundland, remotest of Canada's provinces; he comes from the Avalon Peninsula, the most isolated portion of Newfoundland (and confused in young Wayne's boyish imaginings with the mythical Avalon, where King Arthur sailed to be healed of mortal wounds). It's an apt metaphor for a land that "was the edge of the known world, and looked it." Avalon's natives fiercely resented the 1948 referendum that joined Newfoundland to the Canadian Confederation--especially Johnston's father, the memoir's central character, who keens for lost independence in a manner highly reminiscent of Stephen Dedalus's father in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Indeed, parallels with Ireland are evident throughout, not just because the Johnstons are descended from Irish immigrants but because the Newfoundlanders exhibit a similar passionate insularity and zest for feuding among themselves. Johnston's muscular, plainspoken prose bears little resemblance to that of James Joyce, but his themes of exile and loss, loyalty and betrayal, and an ancient culture's ambivalent relationship with modernity resonate with the great writer's most urgent concerns. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

Returning to the Newfoundland trenchantly chronicled in his acclaimed recent novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston has crafted a sensitive, occasionally elusive memoir centered on three generations of men in his family. As in the novel, Newfoundland's "thirty thousand square miles of bogs and barrens" prove an affecting backdrop. His grandfather eked out a living as a blacksmithAa dying profession in the tiny town of FerrylandAwhile his father, Arthur, trained as an agricultural technician but became a "fish-preoccupied, fish-infatuated man" who took a job as a codfish industry inspector for the Fisheries of Canada. Striking passages recount Arthur's routine days spent tasting cod in a laboratory, returning home unable to bear the sight or smell of fish, and his travels around the province shutting down revoltingly unkempt processing plants. Johnston remains preoccupied with the fierce debates over the former British colony's 1948 confederation with Canada, a stinging defeat for his father and others who yearned for an independent Newfoundland nation. That bitterly contested vote, which saddled the province with billions of dollars of debt and hastened the demise of its rich, insular culture, also gives rise to this memoir's central mystery: an enigmatic family secret that darkened the relationship between Johnston's father and grandfather. Apparently a dispute over loyalty to Newfoundland, this betrayal-tinged affair seems somewhat contrived as the book's emotional touchstone and remains a disconcerting false note in an otherwise skillfully composed reminiscence. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (May 16, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385500319
• ISBN-13: 978-0385500319
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,861,996 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Smashing, June 10, 2000

By 

Michael J. Harris - See all my reviews

This review is from: Baltimore's Mansion (Hardcover)

Any book that can make a reader who hales from the land of pleasant living (i.e., the mid-Atlantic region of the United States) seriously consider spending a winter in Newfoundland is clearly worth reading. Wayne Johnston once again manages to turn what most of us would consider a very dull subject (growing up in Newfoundland) into a minor masterpiece. If you enjoyed "Colony of Unrequited Dreams," you will be equally charmed, intrigued and entranced by "Baltimore's Mansion" but in a more personal -- and, perhaps, more meaningful -- way. I expect that if Mr. Johnston were from the USA, his books would stay at the top of the best seller lists. As it is, he remains a bit of a hidden treasure. Perhaps "Baltimore's Mansion" will help change the situation.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Words left unspoken, May 18, 2000

By 

Paul Harrington - See all my reviews

This review is from: Baltimore's Mansion (Hardcover)

This is a book about loss.

About the loss of communication between generations.

About the loss of a proud nation when its citizens, by the slimmest of margins, voted to be assimilated into Canada.

And about the loss of opportunity to lay to rest family ghosts and unresolved questions.

Unlike his novel "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams", Johnston's memoir is episodic and compartmentalized. The underlying theme is the anguish felt by so many Newfoundlanders when they were forced to choose in a referendum between remaining an independent country or casting in their lot with Canada.

We experience that anguish through the relationships between generations.

There is Johnston's grandfather, an outport blacksmith who carries a secret about the referendum to his grave.

There is Johnston's father, a reluctant federal civil servant who rarely misses an opportunity to bemoan Newfoundland's merger with Canada and berate those who voted for it.

And there is Johnston himself, who is so conflicted about his relationship with his father and grandfather, and with his native Newfoundland, that he can only write about it by leaving.

"Baltimore's Mansion" is most successful in its marvelous vignettes: a nearly disastrous trip into the country to cut ice from a pond, a ride across the island on a much-loved but hopelessly inefficient passenger train about to be taken out of service by the Canadian government, the last enigmatic meeting on the beach between Johnston's father and grandfather, and Johnston's own confrontation with a howling winter storm on a remote island where he has retreated to come to terms with what he wants to write.

Each is a short story unto itself and full of vividly descriptive writing.

"Baltimore's Mansion" also has moments of humour, but the lasting sense is one of regret. Regret for the lost intimacy of small harbours and houses, regret for questions unasked and words left unspoken, regret for a time that was that will never be again.

While this must have been a difficult book to write, it is a pleasure to read: full of character, atmosphere and a sharp sense of what was lost when Newfoundland surrendered its nationhood.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars From blacksmith to wordsmith., June 9, 2000

By 

Craig G Cram - See all my reviews

This review is from: Baltimore's Mansion (Hardcover)

Being from the other side of the confederation with Canada event (my family was pro-confederation), I found Johnson's memoir a real eyeopener to the sense of defeat and angst found in the loss of Newfoundland's precarious nationhood. The political subtext amplifies the family melodrama of loss and defeat. Although a bit too `Irish' for my taste in Newfoundland set stories, the writing is profound and the best in the english language currently being turned out these days. Johnson's family were smiths with iron and his writing is the same; that is, he turns the raw iron of language into something minimal, economical and heavy that carries the weight and experience of generations. Like the anchors, nails, and iron shoes, Johnson's writing will stand the test of time's weathering I'm sure.