Liam Brennan, a young Irish immigrant to Canada,
gets a
job working as a surveyor in British Columbia’s Peace River
Block during the years just prior to World War I. As the war
unfolds in Europe, Liam and some of his fellows enlist in the Canadian
Army and shortly find themselves in war-ravaged Western
Europe. At the Battle of the Somme, Liam suffers a terrible
wound and is captured by the German army and put into a POW camp in
Belgium. Though grievously wounded, Liam, against all odds, survives
the prisoner of war camp and is still there when the Armistice frees
the POWs. In the weeks following his release, he meets Marta,
a young Belgian girl, and is befriended by her and her
mother. After a brief visit to his family in Ireland, Liam
returns to Belgium and marries Marta. During the long months
of his confinement Liam had been strengthened by his resolve to survive
the war and return to British Columbia and make a home there.
He and Marta make their way half the distance around the globe to a
place on the Peace River Liam remembered from his days as a
surveyor before the war. The story of their lives in this new
and pristine country takes the reader through the next half
century. The Brennans struggle with isolation and
hardship. Their children and later their grandchildren take
up the quest to make a new and better life. Along the way,
Liam and Marta must cope with the deaths of some of their children,
fiercely cold winters and insect-plagued summers. They see
the beautiful river they have settled by become a target for a huge
government-built dam. Liam struggles with the dichotomy of
his love for the unchanged river and his involvement in the building of
the dam. The simple life Liam had foreseen becomes clouded by
the growth of the area, elemental forces of nature, the attitudes of
his own children and his own guilt as an agent of change. |
A Place to Stand
A Tale of the Peace River
Country
by J. W. Secrist
Authorhouse, 2006.
Order
a copy
Reviewed in The
Nature Pages
|
