Music and Silence, by Rose Tremain

Picture from Goodreads

This novel, published in 1999 by Chatto and Windus, reveals the astonishing versatility of this writer, whose other novels include the vastly different contemporary story, The Way I Found Her.

Music and Silence takes place in Denmark in the 1600s, and carries with it a social atmosphere vastly different from the one we live in today.

Tremain's plot is complex and even the antagonist Kirsten Munk, the Danish King Christian's consort, evokes an ever more willing sympathy in the reader as she confides her awareness of her own dark side to her diary. Kirsten's personal missive, sprinkled with unnecessary Capital Letters, is where Kirsten  Plots and Plans how to use others for her Own ends.

In this ancient setting of feudal Copenhagen, the dramatic portrayal of a flawed Danish king, his consort, an English lutanist, and the 'Almost Queen's' women stops just short of the grotesque. There is a certain soupcon of comedy here too.

The imagery is lush and unforgettable. Reading this book on my commute, I had to shake myself out of the heavy atmosphere of its strange scenes. Among the most bizarre for me were those portrarying the weird alterations in the personality of the Irish count after his wife wakes him in the midst of a dream of celestial music, and schoolteacher punishing the young King's dyslexic friend, Bror Brorson.

A hauntingly evocative image is that of a shivering orchestra confined to the basement of the castle so that at a signal from the king, they can play delightful music that comes up through a trapdoor into the Winter Room. King Christian veers between using this ethereal music to astonish his guests and consoling himself with the music of the his "Angel," the English lutanist, as the King's consort rejects and cuckolds him and his wealth and health deteriorate.

The voices in this novel are many and varied: the philosophical speeches and thoughts of the king and the diffident attempts of the lute player to answer his questions appropriately contrast sharply with the conversations between the crude outspokenness of Kirsten and the sympathetic and consoling voice of Emilia, her Woman.

In a tour de force of economic characterization, Tremain describes choir master Lionel Neve as "a man entirely content at each day's modest curve."

This is a suspenseful tale of human passions and the suffering they bring; it is an epic exploration of the many meanings of enslavement; it is an exotic tale in which "enchantment very often triumphs over scruple."

Watching a squirrel dine

Photo CT 2013

I could see the squirrel so clearly through the pane of glass. He was a chubby fellow, and he was stuffing himself.  His restaurant was the maple tree outside my window.

As he ate, he exercised, getting into amazing contortions to reach for for the maple keys in nearby branches.

He wasn't tidy, either. After greedily devouring the desirable seeds, he dropped the rest, heedless of whoever might be passing below.

Watching the squirrel dine cleared up a little mystery. Now I know where the maple keys go when they disappear from the bare branches. I used to think they just fell on the ground.

Tiny harbinger of spring

Photo: CT 2013

The rest of the country may not envy the grey days on the "Wet Coast," but we have other compensations.

This is the only corner of Canada where one can see a cherry tree bursting into flower just three weeks into the New Year.

I was walking along East Broadway yesterday when I caught a glimpse of these tiny pink blossoms, early harbingers of spring.

Charles Tupper

Picture: Canadian Encyclopedia

Charles Tupper was born in Nova Scotia in 1821 and died in England in 1915, the last survivor of the Fathers of Confederation.

After his medical education in Edinburgh, Dr.Tupper returned to established a practice. He was first president of the Canadian Medical Association.

Tupper first ran for the Nova Scotia Assembly in 1855, and after serving as Provincial Secretary, he became Premier in 1864. A delegate to the Charlottetown, Quebec and London conferences, he won a federal seat in the new Dominion in 1867.

Like D'Arcy Magee, he stood aside from taking a cabinet post in the interest of bringing in other Nova Scotians and promoting national unity. After 1869, when the "better terms" agreement brought Joseph Howe into the cabinet, Tupper held various portfolios. During the building of the CPR, he was the Minister of Railways and Canals.

Sir Charles Tupper became High Commissioner to the United Kingdom in 1864, but returned to Canada a few years later to serve once more in the Macdonald's Conservative cabinet as Minister of Finance.

In 1896, he returned to Canada from his duties in England once again, to serve as Minister of State in the government of Mackenzie Bowell. After being passed over as party leader in favour of Bowell and Thompson, he finally became Prime Minister, but he served in this role for only ten weeks. The Conservative Party suffered a dramatic defeat in the election of 1896 and the Liberals came to power under Laurier.

The Conservative party had lost credibility in Quebec after many years in power and some serious scandals, and Laurier's Liberals swept to victory on a platform of moderate policies, setting the stage for the future domination of Liberal governments.

Tupper served as opposition leader until the following election in 1900, when he was defeated and retired from politics. He lived for awhile in Vancouver, where his name is commemorated in Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School. Later he moved to Bexleyheath in England, where he died in 1915.

Thomas D'Arcy Magee

D'Arcy Magee statue on Parliament Hill CT

Irish-born Thomas D'Arcy Magee (1825-1868), was  a journalist, poet, orator and statesman and one of the Fathers of Confederation.

Educated in in Wexford, he left for America to write for and edited the Boston Pilot, an Irish-American journal. After three years he returned to Dublin to continue his journalistic career. A young radical, he left the more moderate Freeman's Journal to write for The Nation, the press organ of the "Young Ireland" party.

Implicated in the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848, he escaped his native country to return to America. He lived in New York, Boston and Buffalo, writing for and publishing newspapers. On arriving in Montreal in 1857, he founded a newspaper called the New Era, and in 1858 he was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Canada as the Irish Catholic representative for Montreal West. In 1864, he was a delegate at the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences that paved the way for Confederation in 1867 -- the birth of the new nation.

According to W. Stewart Wallace, D'Arcy Magee's eloquent orations in favour of the new civic nationality were a great help in creating the psychological grounding for the coming union of the first four provinces.

D'Arcy Magee changed parties from the Reformers to the Conservatives, but kept his Montreal seat until Confederation in 1867, and was re-elected to the same constituency in the first House of Commons in the new Dominion of Canada. He was not in the cabinet, however; he stood aside to allow Edward Kenny to take the post, and represent Nova Scotians as well as Irish Catholics. Wallace also calls him "the chief apostle of Canadian national unity" (ibid).

In the interests of that unity, this brilliant orator spoke strongly against the Fenians in 1866, These were Irish nationalists in America who invaded Canada in a series of raids between 1866 and 1871, with the purpose of securing Irish independence from Britain. Speaking against their attacks earned D'Arcy Magee the enmity of the American organization of Fenians. When he was shot in Ottawa 1868, it was a Fenian who was tried and found guilty of his murder.

At the last public hanging in Canada, Fenian sympathizer Patrick J. Whelan died for the crime in front of 5000 people. Yet doubt was later raised about his guilt. This question has been dealt with in a play by Pierre Brault, called Blood on the Moon.

D'Arcy Magee also makes a cameo appearance in the novel Away, by Jane Urquhart, when she gives a fictional account of what led up to his assassination near the Parliament Buildings in 1868.

Lord Elgin

Picture from Toronto Dreams Project 

Lord Elgin was Governor-in-Chief of the Province of Canada from 1847 to 1853. During this time, he promoted development in Canada's agricultural, commercial and industrial sectors.

He also negotiated the 1854 Reciprocity Treaty, an agreement between the United States and the British provinces, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Canada.

Indeed, on paper he was expected to govern all four provinces. Although his budget and staff provided only for Canada, he consulted with his fellow governors to ensure cooperation among the colonies. He worked to integrate postal and telegraph services, railroads and navigational aids (LAC).

The Baldwin-LaFontaine alliance

Canadian Encyclopedia editor James H. Marsh calls it "the friendship that brought responsible government," Without doubt, the political cooperation between the two statesmen Robert Baldwin and Louis LaFontaine was critical for the development of Canadian democracy.

In 1848 when the reformers came to power, the partnership between these two politicians prepared the ground for an inclusive democracy that would serve both English and French Canadians. When the new parliament assembled in Montreal, it was Baldwin who nominated the fluently bilingual A.N. Morin as speaker of the House, insisting that bilingualism was central to this role. LaFontaine seconded the motion, the House cheered, and history was made (James H. Marsh).

Another remarkable moment of cooperation had come years earlier, when French Canadians failed to elect LaFontaine out of suspicion that his cooperation with English reformers was a sellout. Subsequently, Baldwin introduced him as a candidate in the English riding of York, and he was elected, proving to suspicious French Canadians that the cooperation between the French and English reformers was real, with democracy as the goal.

The collaboration between these two early Canadian statesmen is now commemorated annually by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. The first LaFontaine-Baldwin lecture was given in 2000 by the self-described  "public intellectual" John Ralston Saul, who has also written a book about the two men's political accomplishments.

A sampling of other lecturers includes native leader Georges Erasmus (2002), The Honorable Louise Arbour (2005), Inuit climate change spokeswoman Sheila Watt-Cloutier (2009) and the Aga Khan (2010).