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David Macfarlane takes us inside his mother's family, the Goodyears of central Newfoundland, part of the lifeblood of the old colony. Macfarlane, who grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, amid reminiscences of the Goodyears and their past, introduces us to his grandfather and to the aunt and three uncles who served in France during the First World War. The book is at once an elegy and an evocation of pre-Confederation Newfoundland outside the Avalon Peninsula.
The American edition carried the title Come From Away, a term employed by Newfoundlanders to denote an outsider such as Macfarlane himself. But Macfarlane is well placed to regard Newfoundland both inside and outside. As the reviewer in the New Yorker (17 February 1992) correctly observed, the Goodyears acquire an "emblematic character" as the heart and soul of the pre-Confederation era and its lost identity. "Newfoundland--the country, not the province--was a stage small enough to make all their doings, and the doings of their friends and enemies, look larger than life, historical," we are reminded. "It seems ironic now that such a stubborn, independent people could not continue to go their own way politically."
The title of the Canadian edition, The Danger Tree, directs the reader to an old apple tree situated in No Man's Land, where the Goodyear's lost their best men fighting with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. But the title doesn't matter. Either way, the book indirectly speculates on what might have been. Interspersed with illustrations from the family album, pictures of promising young men gazing confidently beyond the camera, it takes a circular route through recollection and anecdote, much as the family itself might have done during one of their gatherings, and arrives at a poignant moment where the railway built at the turn of the century to encourage industry and tourism is discovered tearing up its own tracks.
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