"A man can linger amongst the living even if he has died," he explains, "trying to make peace with what he has lost." And he's brimming with encyclopedic knowledge of Wolfe's life, and of life in the 1700s in general.
He speaks with antique flourish – not the actual archaisms of 18th-century prose, but as a smart person might imitate. Rather, we meet him as a homeless man in modern-day Montreal: Wolfe transmigrated, reborn – or someone so unmoored from reality that he believes, with every fibre in his gangly frame, that he is the dead general.Īt the very least, he's his dead ringer: tall, redhaired, weak of chin and melancholy, as depicted in Benjamin West's famous painting. 13, 1759: a decisive battle that not only saw Quebec fall into British control, but also claim Wolfe's life.Īfter the preface, the narrator shifts from Waugh to Wolfe himself. Students of colonial history will remember Wolfe as the guy credited with Britain's victory over France on the Plains of Abraham on Sept. We start with a preface by a Genevieve (Jenny) Waugh, a historian who's dedicated the book to another GJW: General James Wolfe.
But as with many peculiar books, it's worth your time – evocative, humane and (maybe) totally original. It's perhaps appropriate for a novel about PTSD – and specifically, PTSD as the result of armed conflict, and how some sufferers are unable to recall pivotal aspects of their traumas – that Lost in September is shrouded in narrative fog.
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