This essay recuperates Brian Moore’s mostly forgotten classic of Canadian immigrant fiction, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), in a reading of its protagonist as a study in the necessary self-renovation of a new Canadian. Employing the scholarly work that has been done on the Irish in Canada over the past few decades, this essay contextualizes its reading of Moore’s mid-century novel in a mildly corrective history of Irish immigration to that point. Ginger Coffey will also be seen to prefigure—on the eve of Canada’s officially becoming the much-admired multicultural nation it is today—the central question facing Canadians respecting immigration. The unaccommodating setting of Ginger Coffey, its historical contexts, and its compromising immigrant’s (Ginger Coffey’s) hard-won promise of eventual integration into Canadian society challenge readers to entertain questions about the extent of Canada’s tolerance of immigrants’ tenaciously mistaken dreams. Abstract: Cet article examine une œuvre fictive classique sur l’immigration canadienne par Brian Moore qui a ete presque oubliee – The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960). L’article presente le protagoniste vivant l’auto-renovation necessaire d’un nouveau Canadien. S’inspirant d’etudes sur les Irlandais au Canada realisees au cours des dernieres decennies, l’article contextualise sa lecture du roman de Moore redige au milieu du siecle dans une histoire quelque peu corrective de l’immigration irlandaise jusqu’a ce moment. Ce roman est percu comme un precurseur – juste avant que le Canada devienne officiellement la nation multiculturelle tres admiree d’aujourd’hui – de la question importante de l’immigration au Canada. Le milieu reticent de Ginger Coffey, ses contextes historiques et sa promesse durement acquise et pleine de compromis de l’integration de l’immigrant (Ginger Coffey) dans la societe canadienne defient les lecteurs de reflechir a la facon dont le Canada a tolere les aspirations erronees mais tenaces des immigrants.

Brian Moore's Unsettling Irish Immigrant: The Luck of Ginger Coffey

In the last decade of his life, Mordecai Richler found some of his favourite satirical targets – cultural nationalism, special pleading, injustice and anti-Semitism – fused in the province of Quebec's aspiration for nationhood, especially as that ambition was expressed in 1977's Bill 101, the Charter of the French Language, and its many refinements. This law drastically restricted the use of English in Quebec, violating in outrageous fashion, in Richler's view, the democratic right to free expression of Quebec's non-Francophone minorities. Richler first gained notoriety among the Quebecois when he published his criticisms in an article for the New Yorker (1991), which became the book Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country (1992). The present article first contextualises Richler's satire in the history of Canadian satire, then briefly in Richler's relation to Montreal, and finally in Quebec history with particular reference to language. It proceeds to offer an explication and analysis of Richl...

Gerald Lynch

Papers

Satiric Lament for a City: Mordecai Richler's Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, Bill 101 and Montreal