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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Feb 2007, 304 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2008, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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The historical Norman Bethune—legendary in both his native Canada and China—was a visionary whose dedication touched millions, and as the narrator of this novel he springs to vivid life even as he approaches its end.
From the acclaimed author of The Ash Garden—“an illuminating searchlight on the terra incognita where the personal and the political intersect” (Newsday)—an even more ambitious novel that follows a doctor from the trenches of the Great War into subsequent conflicts whose horrors would soon envelop the world.
The historical Norman Bethune—legendary in both his native Canada and China—was a visionary whose dedication touched millions, and as the narrator of this novel he springs to vivid life even as he approaches its end. Rebelling in childhood against his father’s religion, he finds a calling himself, saving lives on the battlefield, only after nearly losing his own in the trenches in France. In Republican Spain he fulfills his idealism, yet before long politics destroy a romance, compromise his achievement, and drive him to seek refuge and purpose in the vast expanse of China. Here, in the service of the man eventually known as Mao Zedong, Bethune contends with Nationalist and Japanese enemies and begins this account of failed loves, cherished beliefs, discoveries, and reversals for the only person who still makes a future seem possible: the daughter he has never seen.
Storytelling at its best—passionate, wrenching, compelling—about a complex, contradictory man caught in the relentless sweep of history.
Excerpt
The Communist's Daughter
It is my hope that your understanding will win out against any mistrust or anger you may harbour against me when you finally read this. It is so easy to feel anger, and Lord knows I deserve a good dose of it. But I am trying, and you will see I have been trying for quite some time. I also hope that you will read this many years from now, when you are grown, at a time when this story will be long past. With an adult’s eyes it is more likely that you will see this letter for what it is, and know the regret and tenderness I feel as I compose this history for you. Of course, I know I have no control over any of this, yet still I hope. The dead must relinquish so much.
Heaven forbid these pages return to you without me, but allowing for such a possibility I give you my word absolutely that I will recount my life as faithfully as I recall it, nothing added, nothing lost.
Will I be dead? That is certainly the way things seem to go around here, but it ...
Dennis Bock imagines the life of the historical Norman Bethune, keeping the essence of history intact but playing fast and lose with some of the peripheral details, which some readers might consider rather central - such as the fact that the entire novel is addressed to Bethune's daughter who he never met (but historically never had). Having said that, there is no firm evidence that somewhere in the mess of the Spanish Civil War Bethune did not meet a woman and did not have a child, and the novelist must be allowed some leeway to carry out his craft - even though this particular device seems to cause Bock to come unstuck with some critics who feel that in failing to return to his motherless daughter Bethune is all too human but not sufficiently humane. It seems a pity that readers might form such an opinion of Bock's fictional Bethune (and thus, to a greater or lesser extent, of the real Bethune) because of a fictional device - especially as, by the end of the novel, Bock gives sufficient reason to explain why Bethune would be apart from his daughter at this time...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Henry Norman Bethune (Mar 3, 1890 - Nov 12, 1939), known as Norman, was born in Gravenhurst, Ontario. He interrupted his studies at the University of Toronto to set up classes for immigrants in a bush lumber camp in northern Ontario and then, at the outbreak of World War I, enlisted in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. While serving as as stretcher bearer in France, he was wounded at Ypres and returned home to finish up his medical studies, receiving his M.D. in 1916. In 1917 he re-enlisted in the Royal Navy.
After demobilization, he remained in England for post-graduate studies and, in 1923, married Frances Campbell Penney, the daughter of a prominent Edinburgh accountant. They moved to Detroit where Bethune set up his first and only ...
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