reading from
The Navigator of New York
Thursday, 26 September, 7 pm
Ganong Hall Lecture Theatre
Wayne Johnston, who visited us last year, returns this year to launch his epic new novel, The Navigator of New York, and to inaugurate the Lorenzo Reading Series 2002-03. A national bestseller, Johnston’s memoir, Baltimore’s Mansion, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), shortlisted for almost every major literary award, won the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Fiction. A feature film based on The Divine Ryans (1990), also a winner of the Raddall Prize, opened in 1999. The Time of Their Lives (1988) won the Canadian Authors’ Association Prize for Most Promising Young Writer, and The Story of Bobby O’Malley (1986) won the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
The
Navigator of New York is vast, absorbing, and suspenseful. Johnston’s
most recent historical novel – a weave of fact and fiction –
will lure you out of your everyday circumstance and into bustling turn-of-the-century
New York City, and beyond that, to polar seas and icefields. The much-prized
Newfoundland novelist builds the "reality" of those places sentence
by careful sentence. Mysteries, planted early in the novel, propel the
reader through a geography that includes several continents and much travel.
Revelations – later in the narrative – detonate with such
force that everything you had assumed about a character topples with the
velocity of an unsteady iceberg. Personality, Johnston seems to say, is
mostly below the waterline. Narrated by Devlin Stead, Navigator
ends where it begins, in Newfoundland, Stead’s birthplace. His travelling
is motivated by his need to know the truth about his own origins. Moving
to New York, "the Stead boy" is witness to the unbounded expansion
of the city, and as protégé of one of the city’s notable
"navigators," Stead shares with his mentor an unwillingness
"to leave some parts of the globe forever undiscovered, forever known
to be there but never seen, never walked upon." What fuels this book
and its characters is "the greatest prize of all," the North
Pole. Johnston so involves us in the competition for that prize, we suffer
the setbacks, join in the adulation, as the competitors, Dr. Frederick
Cook and Lieutenant Robert Peary, struggle to be the first to the top
of the world. Capacious in character and setting, The Navigator of
New York explores the psychopathology of ambition whether that ambition
belongs to men or to cities.
"[The Navigator of New York] is a shape-shifting epic of magical proportions and dazzling complexity.... [Johnston] can turn a description of an iceberg into a sensory adventure rarely achieved in the pages of a modern novel."
– Quill & Quire