Pete McMartin: Why would a great American traveller want to write about Canada?

“Nothing prepared me for Vancouver.” — Paul Theroux, in his just published travel book, True North: On The Road In Canada.

A few years ago, Paul Theroux, the world’s preeminent travel writer, paid us a visit. He came north to Canada, drove its length from east to west, and out of it came his latest travel book. At 423 pages, True North covers a lot of ground.

Theroux, if you have never read him, is a terrific writer with an unflinching eye. His books are exhaustively researched, as is True North, and he seems to have read every Canadian author worth reading in preparation for his trip here. It is a point of pride for him that he prefers to seek the grittier textures of a place — unlike other travel writers who swan about on the high-end freebies, and, “Whose motto,” Theroux writes, “seems to be, ‘Will gush for money.’” So inspired, he can be caustic and deliciously unsparing in his opinions of a place, which is exactly why I picked up True North as soon as it was available. What, I wanted to know, would a guy like Theroux think of Canada?

Generally, it was this: It’s a nice place to visit.

As he summarized on the book’s last page, he thought Canada “welcoming, diverse, mild-tempered — a vast land with a vibe of a small town, in most respects just as neighbourly.” Aside from the usual cliché about our niceness and mildness and the faint odour of American condescension clinging to it, I suppose it could have been worse.

Theroux’s reason for coming to Canada was, in one respect, a homecoming: His family tree is deeply rooted in Quebec, and he spends a good portion of his trip in Yamaska, a small town 100 kilometres northeast of Montreal. It’s overrun with relatives living and dead, with the first of them — Antoine Theroux, a peasant from southern France — arriving there in 1693.

But the book is also, in another sense, an apology. Always hovering in the book’s background is the unavoidable presence of the buffoon in the White House, and the deteriorating relationship between Canada and the U.S. he brought on by his 51st State campaign. Theroux’s sympathies are clearly with Canada in this regard, and he sprinkles the book with interviews he did with locals asking them how they now view their neighbours to the south. To nobody’s surprise here, their answers ranged from pained bewilderment to contempt.

As for Theroux’s view of Vancouver, I took it he thought that, despite ourselves, we stumbled upon something admirable, or, at the very least, pleasant.

“Vancouver seemed to me one possible version of a city of the future, not the result of an ingenious and humane urban plan or experiment, but for the usual reasons a city grows — the greed of developers, the favours and improvisations of its politicians, the accidental effects of a turbulent world, the influx of new people, and, in Vancouver’s case, its fortunate physical setting.”

He’s rhapsodic about that setting, about how the “sea shimmered on its western edge,” with “the tang of sea air penetrating and drenching the city, which lay under a big dome of sky, in the dazzle of the marine sunlight.” Thank heavens he wasn’t here during an atmospheric river.

He isn’t blind, however, to the city’s drawbacks, about the crushing cost of living here, and the unaffordable real estate that drives the young out, and the fracturing of the metropolitan area into cultural enclaves — “ethno-bubbles,” Theroux calls them. He wonders if those bubbles mirror the fracturing of Canada itself along ethnic lines, and if a singular, distinct Canadian identity can flourish in a country where so many are more attached to their former homelands than their new adopted one.

But the most fascinating part of Theroux’s critique of Vancouver was, for me, his description of the Downtown Eastside. He brought to it a uniquely American perspective.

“The area was seedy rather than destitute — spiky-haired youths squatting on foul blankets, drunks stumbling from stinking doorways, but in spite of the disrepair and the undeniably verminous alleyways, what I saw was an atmosphere of languor and neglect rather than desolation. What was called misery in the Downtown Eastside might be regarded as funky charm in most American cities.”

Here, I thought, was an American who had seen real squalor and poverty, and not just in the Third World he had seen so much of, but in America itself, in its big, blighted inner-cities and vast ghettos. The Downtown Eastside? Peanuts.

But reading that, a greater question came to mind:

Why was Theroux writing about Canada in the first place?

Why try to educate his American audience about us when his efforts might be better spent educating Americans about themselves? Surely the greater mystery isn’t north of the border, but south of it, where at least half of the country appears to have lost its collective mind, and where its citizens willingly install a government that turns its back on the world and gleefully makes enemies of allies.

Why was Theroux here, I wondered, when the real undiscovered country is the place he calls home?