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Fiction Literary

The Sojourn

by (author) Alan Cumyn

Publisher
McClelland & Stewart
Initial publish date
Feb 2004
Category
Literary, Historical
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780771024948
    Publish Date
    Feb 2004
    List Price
    $19.99

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Description

By the award-winning author of Burridge Unbound, a finalist for the Giller Prize
A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year

Highly praised as one of the best novels of the First World War, Alan Cumyn’s The Sojourn tells the story of a young Canadian soldier’s emotional journey through duty, fear, and love. From the front lines at Ypres to the seductive streets of London to memories of a West Coast childhood, we follow Ramsay Crome, a private with the 7th Canadian Pioneers who has volunteered against his father’s wishes. After a particularly horrible assault, Ramsay is granted a ten-day leave to London. It is here that he meets his cousin Margaret, a fervent objector to the war and the woman who will determine his fate in unexpected ways. As Ramsay tumbles into the suffocating embrace of family and the whirl of city life, he is forced to defend his honour and confront his own doubts and terror about the war, knowing that he must ultimately return to the Front. The Sojourn is a powerful yet intimate story about the passions of ordinary people caught in the tide of war.

About the author

Alan Cumyn has written many highly acclaimed novels for both children and adults. His three Owen Skye books have won several major awards. The Secret Life of Owen Skye won the Mr. Christie's Award and was nominated for the Governor General's Award, the Ruth Schwartz Award and the Pacific Northwest Libraries Association Young Readers Choice Award. After Sylvia was nominated for the TD Children's Literature Award, and Dear Sylvia was shortlisted for the Canadian Library Association Children's Book of the Year Award. Alan is also a two-time winner of the Ottawa Book Award. Alan teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently chair of the Writers' Union of Canada.

Alan Cumyn's profile page

Excerpt: The Sojourn (by (author) Alan Cumyn)

Midnight now, and as I have no billet, but must report in the morning, I let my feet take me down the narrow, poplar­lined road back to perdition. It is dark and rutted, but hardly lonely: the road is clogged with a long, lumbering, mud-choked supply line of gear-grinding trucks, horse-drawn limbers and gun carriages, and slogging men on foot . . . most going in the wrong direction, away from the Salient.

“Heading for the Somme,” one lad says to me on his way by, when I ask. “I feel like a lucky bastard to be away from here.”

The arc of battle stretches ahead of me, with the dark, brooding ruins of Ypres smoking in the distance.

Better to keep my eyes down. I plod along, boots squelching in the roadside mud (and what fine boots these have become, now that my feet have adjusted through the pain). We are rank, sweating, filthy, unwashed men and beasts, silent except for the tired tramp of feet, the machinery of our breathing, the occasional fart or grunt or muttered curse aimed at nothing in particular. Silent, that is, compared to the explosions beyond, which are so constant they hardly count as noise.

The road is far too small to accommodate us. More and more I am squeezed to the side by passing trucks and field guns heading away from the line of fire. I expect the shaking, the cold, the fear of some hours ago to return and reclaim me. But step follows step, breath turns to breath, and while my pack and rifle grow heavier, my heart stays slow and calm.

Then for no reason at all I look up at just the right instant to glimpse a brilliant star flare illuminating the night sky. I watch for several more paces as shells explode across the horizon, and then I find myself standing in a field some steps off without being aware of having consciously decided to leave the road. I gaze dumbfounded at the distant splashes of deepest blues and scarlet reds and angry orange balls of flame, of yellow streaking flares and sudden riots of green, purple, blinding white, and then seconds of profound darkness broken again and again by more explosions of colour.

For the briefest moment I suffer the confusion that God is trying to get my attention by this awesome display. But of course there is no God, no God anywhere, unless the darkness itself is God, the unmarked palette of the night sky. The rest of the work is ours completely, our damnation increasing with every blast.

I stand rooted, almost, in the face of this demonstration, suddenly weakened with hunger and despair. How can I go on? How can anyone? Why not be done with it, lie down here and sink peacefully back into the earth? ­Wouldn’t that be better than walking, fully conscious, into the blast?

I stand staring, shaken, an unnoticed scarecrow in a deserted field not far from the true fields of agony and death.

But in the end it is only a moment in a loose collection of moments, a sliding to the side in order to move forward. Soon enough, and under my own steam, I am walking again towards my doom, part of the huge, slogging effort which seems to be moving in two directions at once, like a great slithering beast that cannot make up its mind.

A shell lands screaming in the field, hitting perhaps the exact spot where I’d been standing a few minutes ago. It causes a ripple in the body of the beast, nothing more. I glance back anxiously, try to see what, if anything, was obliterated.

It occurs to me that that was the shell with my name on it. I was supposed to die in that blast, standing alone in the field marvelling at the great bloody buggered universe.

But here I am instead, my feet still moving forward, leaving my ghost to haunt at the shell-hole meant for me.

“Sure is pretty if you don’t think about it too much,” I say to the guy next to me, who doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

Editorial Reviews

“A timeless novel of life during wartime… The Sojourn can be mentioned in the same company of such modern classics as The Wars, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Thin Red Line.”
Toronto Star
“Cumyn crafts unforgettable characters, ingenious plots and dazzling prose, all in a unique voice.… He is destined to be one of Canada’s greats.… The Sojourn is a multi-layered novel of terrible beauty.”
Ottawa Citizen
“Vivid and fascinating.… [A] viscerally evocative and psychologically acute portrayal, laced with dark humour and moments of lyricism, of men at war.”
–Montreal Gazette

“A virtuoso sonata of a First World War novel.”
Georgia Straight
“Cumyn’s achievement is significant. The Sojourn is intelligent, unsentimental, unflinching.”
Literary Review of Canada

“Alan Cumyn is a deft, smooth writer.… Superb.… Very fine.”
Globe and Mail

“A beautifully written novel.… Paced at breakneck speed, and covering only a few days in May, [The Sojourn] offers the whole war in miniature, showing – brilliantly – how the anvil of experience forged soldiers’ bonds.…”
Maclean’s
“Vivid and convincing.… [A] literary page-turner.…”
Quill & Quire
“[Cumyn’s achievement rests] with the power and eloquence of his prose.… The novel transcends topical relevance. It deals with universal themes of love and loss, loyalty and honour, vulnerability and sacrifice, pain and sorrow and the pity that is war.”
–Kitchener-Waterloo Record

“Cumyn taps into a rich imaginative vein to bring his readers into the madness and fragmented experience of the trenches.”
Hamilton Spectator
“A compelling study of the madness of war.… Cumyn uses a trenchant eye for detail to take his readers to the war’s front.… A thought-provoking, worthwhile read.”
–Halifax Chronicle Herald

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