‘Everything is politics’ (circa 1918)
The Bittersweet Year
by Barry Potyondi
London: Holand Press, 2025
$16.49 / 9798297500709
Reviewed by Ron Verzuh
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Readers who follow the BBC series Foyle’s War will be right at home with this WWI love story as it navigates home-front fears and sorrows in two Winnipeg families in the final year of the war to end all wars, a year that saw the return of the maimed and wounded, the arrival of the so-called Spanish flu and the social clashes of the Winnipeg General Strike.
Clare MacMillan (née Robertson) is a 20-year-old middle-class woman who resides in Winnipeg’s trendy Tuxedo district. Some might say she qualifies as upper-middle class given that she grew up with servants. Clare has ambitions to become an artist and art teacher under the tutelage of Mr. Musgrove, “the handsome Scot with the thick brogue.”
She’s newly married to Robert MacMillan, who was shipped off to Europe a month later to face brutal trench warfare against the “boche.” Robert is of the same class. His father is a real estate developer with strong hopes that Robert will return from the war to rise to management prominence in the company.
Both young Winnipeggers are straight-laced, politically conservative, and madly in love. Along comes the First World War and their future shifts to uncertainty. For Clare it has meant four years of worrying about Robert as he reinforces his love for her with each letter from the front. For Robert, it has shaken his faith. “What kind of God allows such incessant butchery of boys barely out of short pants?” he asks himself.
Clare’s younger sister Nora is the radical feminist of the Robertson family and she finds herself at loggerheads with both Clare and her businessman father. “The country’s not ready for these ridiculous Socialist ideas,” he declares at yet another Sunday dinner confrontation, “Maybe we should celebrate the excellent democracy we have while we still can.”
At first Clare sides with her father and frowns on her sister’s behaviour, but a visit to the hospital where Nora works reveals a world of pain, suffering, and destitution. It is world that their father refuses to acknowledge and does little to improve.
As the city rolls unstoppably toward the Winnipeg General Strike in summer 1919, Nora is increasingly engaged with the striking workers’ and their families. Meanwhile, her father joins the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand that is intent on shutting it down. She explains to Clare that he has the “old-fashioned view that some social causes are inherently more valid than others.”
As the social conscience of the novel, Nora further explains that “everything is politics… either politics or money, and often both.” She encourages Clare to help “make life better for people who have little.”
Clare, intelligent but politically naïve, becomes aware of the strike and the reasons for it when she meets Olga, a poor mother in the city’s immigrant North End and tries to help her. Her father shows no sympathy and Clare is aghast at his callousness. She begins to reconsider some of Nora’s political views. Then she meets Dr. Alex Ramsay, Nora’s one-time boyfriend.
Dr. Ramsay is handsome, dedicated, and in love with Nora, but things do not work out. Clare’s life hits another unexpected bump when she is attracted to the doctor herself. Is she falling for him in spite of being married to infantryman Robert?
When Clare learns that Robert has lost a leg in battle, it adds to her uncertainty about what married life will be like. Another character named Thomas offers her advice. He is a badly disfigured veteran struggling to lead a normal post-war life as a married man. He helpfully describes the difficult adjustment he and his spouse have undergone.
The novel’s action occurs over one year from April 1918 to June 1919 and historian Barry Potyondi takes us deep into the front line through letters home from Robert. At the same time, he uses family members’ political differences to observe the home-front domestic scene. As with Foyle’s War, we are thrust into the domestic dilemmas that all the characters face, but most intensely with Clare’s uncertainty about politics, her emotional attachments and her ambivalent feelings for Robert.
Here Okanagan author Potyondi (In Palliser’s Triangle: Living in the Grasslands 1850-1930) must find a way to avoid a clichéd war-time love story that ends with the newlyweds living happily ever after. He has created enough story twists to keep readers interested in this study of home-front class differences. And he does find a way, thus rescuing his novel from a dull conventional ending.
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Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron has recently reviewed books by Brandon Marriott, Harpreet Sekha, The Simon Fraser University Retirees Association, Bill Arnott, R.D. Rowberry, Christy K. Lee, and Colin Campbell for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction, kids lit, poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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