A Son of Québec/Tell Me Why Nights Are Lonesome

Andrew Roy, A Son of Quebec (Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue: Shoreline Press, 2004), 141pp. Paper. $21.95. ISBN 1-896754-39-2. Muriel Gold, Tell Me Why Nights Are Lonesome (Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue: Shoreline Press, 2004), 169pp. Paper. $22.95. ISBN 1-896754-35-X. Shoreline, as I have had occasion to comment in an earlier review, is one of those small, largely unsung publishing houses that play such a significant role in Canada's cultural life. It operates out of a handsome old house, with a delightful verandah, in Ste-Anne, barely a stone's throw from the water's edge: hence no doubt the name. The focus is on local or regional social history and these two slim volumes are typical of its output. The autobiographical Son of Quebec is, for my money, the superior of the two. Roy belongs to a famille souche: its members can trace their lineage back to one Pierre Roy, possibly a member of the Carignan-Saliere Regiment that arrived in Quebec in 1665 and who, in 1672, married Catherine Ducharme, a fille du roi. However, although subsequent generations of Roys had a close relationship with the Roman Catholic Church - nothing unusual about that - in the early 1800s, Andrew Roy's great-grandfather married the daughter of an English officer and became an Anglican. And so a branch of the Roys became members of a tiny French-speaking Anglican minority in a sea of Roman Catholics, and indeed produced a good number of Anglican clergy, including Andrew Roy's own father. The author in fact grew up in the rectory of the Holy Trinity Church in Levis. The somewhat unique position Roy found himself in enables him to write with real insight, understanding and also humour about the place of Protestants - Frenchand English-speaking - within the larger community and how the two communities got along. It is interesting to read that because of his father's clerical collar, 'it was common practice for the French Canadians to raise their hats to him in deference to his vocation'. His rider that 'sociologists of a later date might refer to this common courtesy as an expression of submission to the power brokers of a priest-ridden society, a hypothesis not seriously entertained in the early 1930s even by Levis' tiny English minority' (p. 8) is typical of the sort of observation that enlivens this book. The book does not remain in the distant past, however. After service in the RCAF, Roy went into teaching and eventually returned to Quebec City to work in English Protestant Education at the Provincial level. …

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