Review
THE MUSEUM CALLED CANADA
by Charlotte Gray
Random House, 720 pp.
"There is so much history in things," writes historian Charlotte Gray in her introduction to The Museum Called Canada, and her latest book backs up that statement admirably.
One of the heftier volumes to come on the domestic market just prior to Christmas, it’s as much a tribute to collectors and pack rats everywhere as it is a narrative for Canada’s life to date.
The book isn’t about a real museum, just an imaginary one – consisting of the whole country – that is divided into 25 "rooms" such as Fossil Foyer (billions and millions of years ago), Hall of Martyrs, North-West Gallery and War Room. In these rooms are artifacts, clothing, historical book illustrations, old photos and other memorabilia that illustrate the people, institutions and environment in Canada through the ages.
A model of a Beothuk canoe reflects the transportation of those original Newfoundland inhabitants, now extinct. A reliquary holds part of Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf’s skull, while another display offers the marble head of King George III, smashed from a full-length statue by invading American troops in 1776.
Many of the illustrated exhibits are closer to our times, such as an early compression-moulded plastic radio from 1948; Maurice "Rocket" Richard’s Montreal Canadiens jersey; a Pierre Trudeau 1968 campaign pamphlet; and astronaut Marc Garneau’s coverall from 1984.
Gray accompanies these images with well-crafted essays that blend her personal observations of these things with broader takes on society at large during an earlier era. Delicate Staffordshire figurines of Sir John and Lady Franklin, circa 1850, prompt an account of the explorer’s tragic fate in Canada’s Arctic and lead to a modern photo along the Franklin expedition’s final route, an image depicting a weathered skull (Gray seems to have a thing about old skulls).
Another kind of traveller is remembered in a reprinted cover of Amex, a magazine aimed at "the American expatriate in Canada," roughly corresponding with U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Draft dodgers and deserters were loyal to the magazine until U.S. President Jimmy Carter granted them amnesty in 1977.
Great care seems to have been taken in illustrating the artifacts with sharp, beautifully lit photography but, strangely, many of the modern exterior scenes look amateurish. Views, for example, of Alberta’s Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, a caribou herd in the Northwest Territories, salmon spawning in B.C., and Newfoundland’s L’Anse aux Meadows, resemble cheap scans of old magazines.
Other than that, however, the book is an engrossing artifact itself, the kind of thing you love to find at a boring house party you’re stuck at until your ride’s ready to go.
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