An interesting novel that is somewhat narrow in scope which reflects the life of the characters it portrays. The novel recounts the entry of a stranger into a small village near the coast of British Columbia just after the end of the First World War. It portrays the struggles of the small group of settlers trying to scratch a living out of the forest while some of them cope with memories of the horrors of the war. ( )

The first novel that I have read by the Canadian author Jack Hodgins. It is set on Vancouver Island, post -WWI where a number of returning vets have been captivated by offers of free farm land in virgin country where they could make a fresh start. For many, although the vets talk little about the war among themselves, it seems to have been a chance to put everything behind them: all the horror and the hypocrisy and the waste of the war. It is not so much a novel about the war itself, although that figures importantly in it through the flashback of the principal character Matt Pearson, but Hodgins juxtaposes the experience of the war with that of scratching out a living in the unforgiving, and often heart-breaking experience of clearing the land and trying to put lives on an upward path that would put the horror and waste of the war behind. Few of the farmers appreciated in advance that they would have to clear the primeval forests before any sort of farming could be considered, and for many this was a backbreaking, endless toil. This could not support a family, and so many had to work for the logging companies to have some income. The title, Broken Ground, echoes both the tortured and smashed landscape of WWI and the more peaceful efforts involved in turning forest into farm land (although always accompanied by blasting to remove huge stumps). The former leads to nothing but death or dismemberment, either physically or emotionally and with no positive goal in sight other than to have it all end; the latter has the positive goal of trying to build a life for oneself and one's children in a clean, new environment, but even this pristine space can also lead to death and dismemberment, as happens when a man is killed trying to blow stumps, and others are killed or disfigured, certainly emotionally, when a forest fire sweeps through the settlement.

The characters are varied, and well-drawn from Matt Pearson who loses his adopted and beloved daughter in the forest fire, to Wyatt Taylor, expert in mining and explosives who had used that expertise in the war, but was now able to turn it to good in helping the farmers to clear their land, while pursing a woman whom he had followed across the country but who would not have him.

Towards the end of the book, one of the principal protagonists, who was a child at the time of the fire, but has by this time become an adult, watches a movie made about the forest fire and its effect on the settlement and the people. He muses:

Once the movie had started putting together a portrait of the Returned Soldiers and their families I began to suspect that I had already lost something important that I didn't even know about, before I was born or soon afterwards. We all had. And had gone on losing even more of it ever since, whatever it was. Behind the colourful parade of this century's gains and losses was huge absence of something that was neither identified nor regained nor replaced.

That something, I think, was a sense of innocence and a feeling that life and society were structured in ways that would lead people to greater benefits and well-being. This was destroyed by the experiences and losses of the war, and exacerbated when survivors found that even afterwards that hardship and death and loss were not unique to war. They were, however, in a sense more bearable for not being the results of the deliberate actions of men, and therefore offered some vision of a better future.

One quibble I had is with the description of war poems as, "You'd think there'd been nothing but beautiful lads in the war, golden-haired and pretty as girls. The English could write such things without squirming, bless them". This may have been true at the beginning of the war with some of the bugle-appeals of Rupert Brooke and others, but it is a poor reflection of the bulk of war poetry epitomized by Owen, Sassoon, Blunden, Rosenburg, and many others who certainly had nothing to do with glamorous portraits of war.