bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1995-1996) — Winter 1995–96 // Hiver 1995-1996, pp. 39–40
This is it!!! Have we died and gone to heaven?
Now coming to a bookstore near us is a MAJOR NOVEL, written by a MAJOR BROADCAST JOURNALIST FAMOUS IN THE USA, about, now get this, A CANADIAN FOREIGN SERVICE OFFI- CER, NOW THE CANADIAN CONSUL GENERAL IN NEW YORK, WHOSE TORRID LOVE AFFAIR WITH A BEAU- TIFUL MODEL THREATENS HIS CAREER AND FAMILY. And you thought Princess Di’s BBC interview was hot stuff!!
The Voyage and the Foreign Service
Robert MacNeil, the famous Canadian journalist based in New York, who until his retirement in October 1995 had been the co-anchor of PBS’s The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, has written a second novel, The Voyage. This one has for its backdrop the Canadian foreign service. That’s right. This book takes place not in the usual Hollywood setting of Joan Collins, the racing world of Dick Francis, the filthy rich world of Sidney Sheldon, or the down and out world of Mickey Spillane, but in our ever so familiar world of the Canadian foreign service.
MacNeil has done his homework. The paraphernalia, shop talk and work environment of the foreign service are all here — SIGNET, MITNET, COSICS, FS, EX. This is the stuff every foreign service employee knows and breathes. The hero “recently receives his “EX-5”; “he us(es) COSICs, thus alerting everyone on the secure computer link”; “a feeling of caution made him avoid the MITNET line that connected Canadian government offices worldwide”; “there were no messages at the Beekman Towers, where officials from Ottawa stayed” (during the UN General Assembly). All that’s missing in the book are reminders from the Deputy Minister that late appraisals are a sign of poor management and a system message that SIGNET is down for the weekend
The Voyage’s plot is realistic. David Lyon is a fifty-two year old career foreign service officer who is on his last posting as the Consul General in New York. His career path typifies the high-flying FS career of his generation: junior posting in Washington, desk job in Latin America division, special assignment in PMO, First Secretary and acting High Commissioner to Zambia, Canadian Ambassador to Finland, Deputy High Commissioner to UK, and Canadian Consul General in New York. His career is as real as those in the old foreign service “stud” book, except perhaps for his kidnapping by guerillas in Rhodesia which receives worldwide press coverage. If only our Ambassadors or High Commissioners were so lucky. But hey, we gotta keep the plot moving; it’s better than following our hero to head up the Corporate Management and Personnel Branch.
Canadian foreign policy weaves its way through the plot and all the golden oldies take a bow on stage — PMO/External rivalry in the Trudeau years, the Third Option, the opening of relations with China, Commonwealth Head of Government meetings, Nixon’s unilateral import surcharge, and the FTA. Prime Ministers Trudeau and Mulroney make special guest appearances.
MacNeil obviously knows Ottawa; no Rocky Mountains in Saskatchewan in this book. Here’s a scene that presages shovelling out the driveway and makes my wife seriously contemplate leaving me: “Emerging from Sandy Hill, he walked up the Rideau Canal embankment towards the impertinent Gothic profile of the Chateau Laurier and the Parliament Buildings, a fragile rampart at the margin of civilization, defining the world’s coldest capital after Ulan Bator. Between the gaps of the building, beyond the Gatineau hills, the horizon was weighed down by pale green-gray clouds heavy with menace, where the spirit of the North assembled its implacable forces….” All that’s missing is a description of the Loeb store on Beechwood.
If MacNeil has the work, the career, and Ottawa spot on, his portrayal of the Consulate General in New York is downright spooky. MacNeil must have had a spare key to the official residence and our office, or he was invited to too many events. John, the driver of the Consul General in the book, is our driver; our library on the sixteenth floor of the Exxon Building is correctly described, as is the official residence on 550 Park Avenue.
David Lyon’s day is a page taken from the present Consul General’s Lotus Planner: “Breakfast discussion at the America’s Society on easing US-Canadian trade frictions, meeting with a trade minister from Saskatchewan, remarks at the opening of a publishers’ exhibition of Canadian books, the reception at the residence, Carnegie Hall for a performance by a Montreal violinist, dinner afterwards…” We’re thinking about photocopying portions of the novel for the Mission Operational Plan, Rating Reports and Hospitality Diaries.
This is a novel that foreign service personnel can relate to.
The Babe
Then there’s Francesca D’Anielli, Lyon’s passionate love interest for twenty years. Unbeknownst to his wife and children, and to the rest of the diplomatic corps, David has led a double life that is now about to explode just as he is making up his mind to take Mulroney’s offer to become the Foreign Minister.
Ahh, Francesca. Camilla Parker Bowles, she is not. THIS IS A BABE.
She is everything: a great bod: “She returned in a bikini revealing a body so exquisite it took his breath away”; a great lover: “David’s spirit transported to a sublime plane, as though thousands of years had fallen away and they were alone in Arcadia, the new children of Eros”; a great conversationalist: “It sounded like Francesca talking — uninhibited, daring, funny, with an occasional simple phrase so intense in feeling as to make him swallow and breathe more rapidly”; a great dancer: “That night they went out dancing. She moved as though she were making the music, the reggae band playing to her lead”; a great career: stewardess to famous supermodel to successful fashion boutique owner in Finland. What more could a red-blooded guy ask for?
Oh yeah, I forgot that other major Canadian prerequisite for the perfect mate: “She wore languages like clothes, lightly, casually, without studied effort. Her French was fluid compared to the stiff accuracy David had acquired when bilingualism become essential. She’d probably never studied a verb” Now, this is some BABE.
And that’s not all. Apparently after each tryst with Francesca, Lyon’s drafting and analytical skills are liberated, so that his memos and policy papers soar like Martin Luther King speeches, moving beyond the stale, mundane prose of External. Obviously more than his sinuses are cleared. Maybe CFSI should rethink its writing modules.
So the plot thickens. This is a novel that all Eighth Floor, FS and other foreign service guys can relate to.
The Great Canadian Foreign Service Novel?
Does this book, so accurate in its description of our foreign service world and so torrid with its love affair between a career foreign service officer and the dream BABE (and oddly so topical what with Lady Di, Prince Charles and their dueling adulteries on the front pages), make it as the great CANADIAN FOREIGN SERVICE NOVEL?
Regrettably, no. This is not to be our workforce’s Grapes of Wrath, or our War and Peace or our Catch 22.
True, the novel has an intriguing opening when Francesca is missing and presumed dead and David worries about how this will blow apart his career and family life. The novel then alternates between chapters on David’s and Francesca’s careers over the course of twenty years, interspersed with their various shenanigans together in bed or in the ditches of Guyana. Not bad stuff. Guyana may yet lose its hardship status. However, there is one major problem. David Lyon is one boring guy. I can’t see this guy getting return invitations to any party, let alone shining in the foreign service or attracting the BABE.
External Affairs in this book is still populated by an abnormally high number of diplomats of the old fart school. They are constantly disapproving of Lyon and of the Prime Minister of the day. Ferguson, the Assistant Under Secretary of Hemisphere Affairs, grumbles at Lyon, “Toadying to the PMO… The worst crime in a foreign service officer… is to tailor your reporting to please the political bosses … We have to honour the traditions of this department for straight, unbiased analysis”. Yeah, gimme a break. Get real.
Then listen to Wallace Farquhar, father-in-law of Lyon and former Assistant Under- Secretary, “Trudeau’s a popinjay”; “she’s a flibbertigibbet”. No-one speaks like this outside of Masterpiece Theatre or My Fair Lady. Most of our senior management prefer to outswear political masters than speak like British toffs.
As for Francesca, she certainly has more fun and hangs around a better party crowd. She is someone you would want featured in the Sports Illustrated bathing suit issue.
However, MacNeil spends an inordinate amount of time drooling over her physical and emotional attributes and Lyon’s infatuation with these considerable strategic assets. She even eats mangos more sensuously than anyone on this planet. Some of this is inspirational literature, especially to those of us who seize on any excuse to procrastinate writing briefing notes. But 288 pages of it???! Really, it gets to be embarrassing, almost as embarrassing as listening to raunchy phone conversations between Prince Charles and Camilla.
On top of this, for every sentence in which Francesca is described as the mother of all BABES, David’s faithful wife, Marilyn, is portrayed as a bag of potatoes. One has the impression that MacNeil went out of his way to deal a bad hand (as well as other body parts) to Marilyn and load Francesca with top of the line features. This is very unfair, especially since Lyon is nothing to write home about, let alone base a novel on.
Finally, in switching between David’s and Francesca’s stories, MacNeil goes on about Canadian foreign policy and sailing. Unfortunately, the excruciating details of both may bore outsiders who do not do these things. I can take the foreign policy stuff; after all, it’s a job. I found the sailing chapters with Francesca on how to hoist a mast and clean the poop deck pretty deadening. I was left longing for the mango scenes again, and for the innumerable scenes in which everyone seemed to smile knowingly and strangely approvingly when David and Francesca left a hotel room, broom closet or roadside ditch.
The Voyage, in the end, is not the Great Canadian Foreign Service Novel. It often reads, in all its earnestness, much like how our Policy Group might put together a novel if they were not doing another review of Canadian foreign policy. That being said, I think foreign service employees will enjoy the book. It is our world. We will see ourselves in it. And what’s more fun, we can all speculate in the cafeteria on “Who Really Is David Lyon and Why Is Robert MacNeil Saying All Those Wonderful Things About Him and the Babe?”
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1995-1996) — Winter 1995–96 // Hiver 1995-1996, pp. 39–40. Read the rest of this issue →
