Art for All

British Posters for Transport

Teri J Edelstein, editor

Yale University Press

£30

The Yale Center for British Art is an art museum at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, housing the most

comprehensive collection of British Art outside the United Kingdom.

Concentrating on work from the Elizabethan period onward, the Center was established in 1966 through a gift from Paul Mellon of his British art collection, together with an endowment for operations of the Center, and funds for a building to house the works of art.

Affiliated with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, the collection consists of nearly 2,000 paintings and 100 sculptures, with an emphasis reflecting Mellon’s interest in the interval between William Hogarth’s birth (1697) and J. M. W. Turner’s death (1851).

Other artists represented include Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, Joseph Wright, John Constable, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, Robert Polhill Bevan, Stanley Spencer, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.

Artists from continental Europe and America who painted for British patrons or otherwise pursued their careers in Britain are also represented — including Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Canaletto, Benjamin West and James McNeill Whistler — among hundreds of others as the collection has continued to grow.

Then came an innovation. In 1991, Henry S Hacker (Yale class of 1965) donated twelve London Underground posters from the 1950s and 1960s to the Centre, inaugurating its poster collection. And in the years that followed, Hacker added almost two hundred more.

Today, the collection of poster art of London’s Underground and bus system documents its history almost from the beginning of Frank Pick’s famed publicity campaign of 1908 through to the 1970s. Also included are poster campaigns of the main British rail lines — from their consolidation in 1923 into the Great Western Railway; the London and North Eastern Railway; the London, Midland and Scottish Railway; and the Southern Railway — to their nationalization as British Railways in 1948.

But Hacker’s acumen as a collector hasn’t ended there: it has since expanded to embrace a broader range of British poster art, adding examples created by the General Post Office, Wembley Stadium and Shell Oil.

The genesis for his passion? “My own personal ‘Rosebud’ – my most vivid early memory—was of a red Dinky Toy,” Hacker writes in the introduction to this volume. “A London double-decker bus given to me by my three Canadian aunts when I was a young child.”

Decades later, that beloved, long remembered gesture has produced arguably the greatest and most comprehensive collection of British poster art and its eye-popping images from Kew to Hampton Court anywhere.

And now you don’t have to go to New Haven to see it, thanks to Yale University Press which has produced this gorgeous coffee table book of annotated images together with a fulsome account of the British Transport system and its long affinity for art, exemplified by the career of Edward McKnight Kauffer and dozens of illustrators and painters such as Paul Nash and Frank Brangwyn who remain famous.

This is a great souvenir for expats returning to Canada. nor is it too early to consider this as the perfect Christmas gift for Anglophile relatives or as a sumptuous addition to your own book collection. Paula Adamick

An Anthology of Canadian Literature

Donna Bennett, Russell Brown

Oxford University Press

£40

In a recent column, National Post books editor Philip Marchand described the tone of Canadian writing as “mournful.”

“It struck me that much of our finest Canadian literature is a looking back rather than a focus on the present, on the part of writers whose Canada — the Canada they grew up in, the Canada they knew through their elders — has vanished,” Marchand wrote. “The Canadian culture that sustained them and that supplied much of their inspiration is dead. This reality, in turn, partly accounts for the mournful tone they have often adopted.”

He first noticed this tendency, he says, when he heard the late novelist Timothy Findley deliver the Margaret Laurence Memorial Lecture to the Writers’ Union in 1992. In the speech, Findley lamented that his country was eroding in front of his eyes.

“He didn’t, of course, say that he was losing the country that was once dominated by Irish and Scots,” Marchand writes. “He was vague about just what country and what culture he was losing.”

Nevertheless, Findley’s perception is supported by An Anthology of Canadian Literature, a compendium of Canada’s literary history which includes writings by many of Canada’s most famous and most influential writers, including Susanna Moodie, Frederick Philip Grove, Charles GD Roberts and Sara Jeannette Duncan, and ranging through EJ Pratt, Earl Birney, Margaret Avison, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, Don MacKay, Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. It also knits the links between them.

“Munro will likely be the last writer of this valedictory school,” noted Marchand.

Indeed, this splendid volume confirms his observation as the final third of it encompasses a whole new breed of Canadian writers, from Michael Ondaatje to Rohinton Mistry. “The future belongs to writers such as Russell Smith, Dionne Brand, Zoe Whittall and others who chronicle the lives of frenetic young Torontonians in pursuit of happiness. These Torontonians have minimal interest in their ‘roots’, and a highly unsentimental view of their forbears. Their Canada is a kind of superb vacuum that gives them breathing space and the opportunity to be entertained endlessly.”

Marchand is correct as any reader who loves Canadian literature will discover by dipping into this book in which, beginning in the 18th century, a sense of true Canadian identity seeps in through osmosis. PA

Unsolved

Robert Hoshowsky

Dundurn Press

£14.99

Forget CSI. Technological advances in forensics and DNA testing and the advanced investigative skills used by police have not been able to solve hundreds of crimes across Canada, the trails of which grow colder as time passes and new leads and new witnesses fail to materialize. Some of the cases profiled here are well-known – such as the murders of Nicole Morin and Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan, the 9-year-old whose body was found in a fridge in 1983 – while others have slipped from public consciousness.

Remember the case of Domenic and Nancy Ianiero, the Canadian couple who died mysteriously in Mexico in 2006?

You may not remember it, but Hoshowsky will remind you of it and eleven other cases that occurred between 1968 and 2006, all still open and occasionally being re-examined by police using the latest tools and technology.

In Unsolved, Hoshowsky takes the reader through all known aspects of the crimes and how police are trying to solve them using three-dimensional facial reconstructions, DNA testing, age-enhanced drawings, original crime scene photos and many other methods so sophisticated that they may one day break any one of these cases.

Yet common to all of them is a key element – luck – the absence of which has produced this expertly assembled and engrossing casebook. Heather Harrington

Never Look Away

Linwood Barclay

Orion Books

£12.99

One distracted glance and your kid goes missing. The lad is soon found but then his mom suddenly vanishes too.

So begins another thriller by Canadian author Linwood Barclay whose latest mystery has more disappearing people than a show starring Seigfried and Roy.

At the centre of the action is David Harwood, a quick-thinking, hardworking reporter for The Standard, the local newspaper in Promise Falls, in upstate New York.

As Barclay’s tale opens, Harwood’s scruples are tested when he uncovers a local political scandal brewing as town politicos begin courting a private corrections company in their attempt to land a lucrative penitentiary in Promise Falls. The evidence indicates that the publisher may also be in on the backroom deal. What to do?

Harwood’s mettle is being tested on the home front as well. Despite his abiding love for his wife, Jan, his newshound instincts tell him that all is not well in her pretty little head. Then things get even crazier when, on a family trip to the Five Mountains amusement park, their young son Ethan goes missing … briefly. A bearded man is seen near Ethan’s stroller, but the boy is soon found. Relief all around, that is until Jan disappears soon after, triggering her husband’s ongoing nightmare.

The result is yet another unput-downable read by Barclay whose unerring flair for brilliant dialogue, deft plotting and sharply drawn characters has turned his growing stack of novels into bestsellers.

Take Don Harwood, David’s lovable yet anal dad, often referred to as Don Hardass at his old job as a city building inspector.

Typical of David Harwood’s observations about his dad is this: “When you leave the spoons to dry like this without turning them over, the water ends up leaving a mark,” he’d say to my mother, holding up one of the offensive items of cutlery.”

“Piss off,” Arlene would say, and Don would grumble and go out to the garage.”

It’s this uncanny knack for creating oh so familiar scenarios that lifts Barclay’s stories above his competitors.

As his story unfolds, his characters are woven into his many plots and sub-plots, apparently disconnected at first but then skillfully tied together in a wholly satisfying story that races to its action-packed conclusion.

Never Look Away is Toronto-based Barclay’s eighth novel and follows fast on the heels of Fear the Worst and No time For Goodbye, the latter of which has been optioned for a movie. No surprise there. Nor is it a stretch to suppose that a second offer might follow after some mogul opens this, Barclay’s latest page-turner, on a flight back to Hollywood. Jerry Todd-Jenkins