When Windsor-based novelist André Narbonne started email exchanges with his mother in the early 2000s as a way to keep her company, he didn’t expect to learn that the entire history of his family in Canada could be traced back to a doctor’s prescription from a century earlier.
Family History Uncovered
Narbonne’s great-grandfather Harry Short, she told him, had grown up in colonial South Africa in the late 19th century and had participated on the British side of the botched Jameson Raid of 1895, where he was captured by the Boers and later freed after the British paid for his ransom. Later, working as a boilermaker, he fell ill with a tropical disease. His doctor, believing a cold climate would cure him, prescribed him ‘Winnipeg’.
Harry Short’s story and the ensuing multi-generational family saga is the basis of Narbonne’s new novel, Those are Pearls, out June 15 with Palimpsest Press.
A Rich and Complicated History
His maternal family, Narbonne learned from those email conversations with his mother, now 93, had a rich, complicated and often notorious history. His great-grandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts were soldiers, farmers, bootleggers and communists who, accidentally or by choice, found themselves regularly intertwined in Canadian and world historical events.
Harry Short, notably, fell in love in Cape Town with Margaret Roll, a woman with a crooked spine from a wealthy family. Once married, he convinced her to move with him to Canada as part of the western expansion. But in a bid to escape what turned out to be “a bad marriage” a few short years later, Harry lied about his age to enlist in World War I and left for the trenches of Europe.
“All of this is true,” Narbonne said. “There’s nothing that I could invent that’s more interesting than the facts.”
From Giller Longlist to 25-Year Obsession
Narbonne’s first novel, Lucien & Olivia, about a marine engineer meeting a philosophy student at Dalhousie University during a one-month leave in Halifax, was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. While that book took him five years — and seven rewrites — to complete, Those are Pearls is 25 years in the making, he said.
A professor of English and creative writing at the University of Windsor, Narbonne has done a lot of things in that time span, including publishing three books and founding Conspiracy Press, a Windsor-based independent publisher. But writing the stories that would eventually make up Those are Pearls became a sort of obsession over the years.
“I would come back to it,” Narbonne said of writing the novel. “Maybe I’d leave it for six months, and I’d come back to it, and I’d read it. And always something in it moved me to go back to it, to say, ‘no, I’ve got to do more here.’ I wasn’t looking at it and being aloof to it. It poked me in every time.”
Narbonne wanted to be “very exact” with historical details and conducted extensive research on the sensibilities and customs of his characters: what religious mores they believed in, what clothes they wore, what recipes they made, what the cities they lived in smelled like at the time.
