The Sojourn

Alan Cumyn

McClelland and Stewart

Patty: What I liked about Alan Cumyn’s The Sojourn (McClelland and Stewart) is the way he thrusts us into a muddy trench in the mid­dle of World War I, where the nar­ra­tor is car­ry­ing a load of some­thing called iron pig’s tails on his shoul­ders and his buddy behind him is wrestling with two sheets of cor­ru­gated iron. A few pages on, we fig­ure out that these sol­diers’ job is to repair trenches while shells explode around them and all they have is each other. After a good dose of filth, fatigue, death and dis­mem­ber­ment, the main char­ac­ter, a Canadian sol­dier named Ramsay Crome, takes a short train trip to London for ten days leave; there he wal­lows in the lux­ury of a hot bath and clean sheets. Ramsay’s thoughts are under­stand­ably mud­dled by the con­trast between the hor­ror of the front and the unre­al­ity of ordi­nary life just a short dis­tance away, where peo­ple have the time and energy to argue about whether England should be fight­ing at all, and his con­fu­sion inten­si­fies when his father offers to use his influ­ence to get Ramsay trans­ferred away from the front. All of Ramsay’s bud­dies are back there, and why should he avoid it just because his fam­ily has friends in high places? I’m still won­der­ing what pig’s tails are, but this snap­shot of war has stayed with me in a way that a more sweep­ing work might not.

 

Kris: The First World War has offered inspi­ra­tion for count­less lit­er­ary works and, because some of them are among the most pow­er­ful nov­els ever writ­ten, I found it dif­fi­cult to accept The Sojourn as the lit­er­ary mas­ter­piece many crit­ics have claimed it to be. When young Crome leaves the muddy, bloody may­hem of the trenches for a leave in civ­i­lized London, per­haps he can find some per­sonal peace and per­spec­tive on the mean­ing of the war and his place in it. His encoun­ters with his paci­fist cousin Margaret are a high­light of the story, but not as provoca­tive and ten­der as they need to be. The descrip­tions of trench war­fare pale beside those in clas­sics such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Parade’s End, and the icy calm of English soci­ety, the eye of the storm, is sim­plis­tic and unin­spir­ing when com­pared to Timothy Findley’s Wars. Perhaps it is because other authors have suc­ceeded so well in express­ing the utter dev­as­ta­tion of World War I that this novel left me cold.