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The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is the master work of Wayne Johnston, the St. John's writer who began his career as a reporter for the old Daily News in 1979-81, then left for Ottawa to write full time. In short order, Johnston produced The Story of Bobby O'Malley (1985), which won the Books in Canada/W.H. Smith First Novel Award, and The Time of Their Lives (1987), which brought him the Canadian Authors' Association/Air Canada Award for young writers. His next novel, The Divine Ryans (1990), incited further acclaim, and it has since been adapted as a feature film. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, a contemplation of the soul of Newfoundland itself, is Johnston's most ambitious and most accomplished work. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1999.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams brings us intimately into the history of Newfoundland through the career of its central character, "Joseph Smallwood"--not the first premier of the province but a fictional construct who engages in some of the actual Smallwood's activities, as well as other imagined events, leading up to Confederation in 1949 and beyond. Operating on at least three levels of textuality, it is an ambitious attempt to reach into the depths of Newfoundland as a society and explore something of its identity. As Johnston said in a CBC Radio interview in 1998, "The unrequited dreams are not only the privations that Newfoundland has endured over the centuries but its thwarted or aborted national aspirations. Its march to nationhood was cut off, and therefore the dream of nationhood that a lot of Newfoundlanders had went unrequited. For the characters in the book, a lot of their dreams and aspirations are unrequited as well, sometimes because of politics, sometimes because of flaws in their own character, sometimes because of chance."
The novel has raised questions about the efficacy of historical fiction, especially reconstructions of the recent past. Rex Murphy concluded in the Toronto Globe and Mail (3 October 1998), for instance, that "Fictionalizing an inner life and inventing a love interest has shorn Joey of the vigour and elemental charisma that were the magnetic signature of the original." Johnston replied on 23 November, "There are many precedents for it in world literature, but few in Canadian literature, which I suspect may be the reason that some Canadian critics find its premise so hard to accept." Regardless of which of these views is accepted, the reader will discover one of the more stimulating fictional treatments of Newfoundland public life, a journey through time enlivened by Johnston's characteristic wit.
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