God's Sparrows. Philip Child

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      Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor

      Dundurn Press presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.

      This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.

      The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.

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      Introduction

      When Philip Child’s novel God’s Sparrows was published in the spring of 1937 by the British publisher Thornton Butterworth, the realistic war novel was a more than decade-old phenomenon, familiar to readers in all the combatant nations of the Great War. What we now think of as the canonical texts of the First World War: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–28), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1929), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), had established a pattern of gritty realism, detailing both the physical and psychological horrors of modern war. Any serious novel with literary ambitions that followed these was required to fall in step and deliver what readers and reviewers had come to see as an “authentic” portrait of war. Authors who failed to detail the innumerable horrors of combat were dismissed as writers of romance or worse, propaganda, and not to be taken seriously.

      Canadian writers who had served during the war contributed to and mirrored the trend that favoured realism in war literature, while simultaneously addressing how the Canadian war experience, though similar, differed from that of our allies. Peregrine Acland’s All Else is Folly (1929), republished by Dundurn in 2014, was the first of several realistic Canadian war novels published in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain that showed the war from a distinctly Canadian perspective. Several more significant novels would follow in quick succession: Leslie Roberts’s When the Gods Laughed , George Godwin’s Why Stay We Here? , W. Redvers Dent’s Show Me Death! , and Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed would all be published in 1930 in multiple editions throughout the English-speaking world, to varying levels of critical and commercial success.

As the effects of the Great Depression worsened, however, Canadian war novels written by veterans ceased to appear altogether.[1] Why this is so is not entirely clear: Canadian memoirs and histories continued to be published throughout the 1930s, while writers such as Will R. Bird, Harold Cruickshank, and Benge Atlee published dozens of short stories in the pulps and newspapers that dealt directly with the war. Despite the popularity of other forms of Canadian war writing, the Canadian war novel entered a dormant period after the boom of 1930. God’s Sparrows , published in 1937, was the last Canadian novel of the war written by a combatant before the Second World War began.