Thursday 5 August 2010

John English, "Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau: 1968-2000"

I was looking forward to reading this book, if only because Canadian political history of the 1960s and 1970s is one of my research passions. That being said, my appraisal of the book is perhaps harsher than the average reader's might be. And... my appraisal isn't really that harsh.

My greatest complaint, or perhaps this is more a reminder for the casual reader, is that this book is about Trudeau the man. That is not to say that English's book doesn't provide social, political and even some economic context for Trudeau's life, but it is primarily an exploration of the events, decisions, and thinking of a person who was in many respects notoriously guarded about his personal life.

English does a good job of providing the 'big brush marks' of Trudeau's life. At 600-some pages for a second volume, covering about thirty years (well, really, about fifteen years... the events after the mid-1980s get pretty short shrift), it has a lot of territory to cover. Trudeau's four terms as Prime Minister saw, as English points out, events that really, fundamentally changed Canada. Many of these events are tied directly to Trudeau's vision of how the country should be. Perhaps this is the core problem of the book. McCall and Clarkson did an excellent job of surveying the political and economic aspects of Trudeau's tenure as PM. This book at times seems to waffle between trying to tell the political story, and the personal story of Trudeau's life. Of course, the political is deeply interwoven with the personal in this story, and as noted above, Trudeau was very guarded about his personal life, but (and this is a big 'but' for me) as a biography, there are many aspects of Trudeau's personal decision-making and beliefs (such as his Catholicism), that I think are not adequately explored in this volume.

Nonetheless, the book is eminently readable, well-researched, and a good addition to Canadian history writing. As a fan of the era, however, I'd like to see more.

No comments: