Randy Boyagoda. Governor of the Northern Province

Randy Boyagoda. Governor of Northern Province. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2006. 208 pp. $32.00 sc. Randy Boyagoda's comic novel, which appeared on 2006 Giller Prize long-list, is an intelligent and timely satire. It is highly literary, filled with allusions and jokes about Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, L. E Hartley, Joseph Conrad, Robertson Davies, and John Buchan (in his capacity as Governor-General). It is also caustic and unsparing about both politics in abstract and specific political conditions in Canada today. For instance, Liberal Party is described as the PRI of north (131); this jab comparing Grits to once-hegemonic Mexican colossus is sharp, ),et not totally wide of mark. Boyagoda brings together a duo of unlikely connivers. One is Jennifer Ursula Thickson, a middle-class girl from rural Ontario who yearns for political possibilities (53) as an antidote to mediocrity and awkwardness her social milieu ascribes to her (she loses a contest for high school class president to None of Above). Another is Bokarie, a former politician from fictional African nation of Atwenty, whose political ambitions in his home country are thwarted by willingness of president to dispose of him in order to maintain his public image after Bokarie had attempted to cultivate him by committing atrocities in his name. Bokarie steals a Canadian passport, kills a man on shipboard--he is no innocent waif--and forges an identity as a refugee in a Canada willing to show refugees abstract pity. He stumbles onto Jennifer, who is already using causes to advance her cause, utilizing drowning of a young girl, Little Caitlin to mount a Think Pink campaign that takes Think Globally, Act Locally truisms and encases them in layers of cutesy schmaltz. Jennifer indulges in hypocrisy not unlike Mrs. Jellyby's faux African humanitarianism in Dickens' Bleak House. Paradoxically though, Jennifer tries to evade these castigations by insisting that she only espouses causes by which she has been personally touched--thus relevance of Little Caitlin, or of Bokarie himself, as a specific index of problems of African refugees. As Bokarie is a fraud, proponent and cause have been ideally matched, though Jennifer is, for most of book, unaware of Bokarie's true provenance. Boyagoda, who has written for The Walrus and other general-interest publications, studied religion and literature at Boston University and University of Notre Dame, and now teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto. Though some (not all) of his associations suggest rightward political leanings, satiric wrath vented in Governor of Northern Provinces is delightfully even-handed. Indeed, satire is not so much on political positions, but on bravado of people who try to reinvent themselves and credulity of those who accept these insincerities because they find them comforting. Bokarie, for instance, both in Africa and Canada, uses religion to buttress his moral credibility, renaming an African boy Jesse in order to impress his superiors with his fine scriptural elocution (119); elsewhere in narrative, he uses same skills to ingratiate himself with a born-again Canadian car dealer. …

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