Home & Away by Ian McKercher
2025, Ian McKercher, 290 Pages, $25.00
Homefront WW2
This is book five in the Frances McFadden novels, about a young secretary who effectively runs the bank of Canada during the 1930s and into the Second World War. While well-researched, I would struggle to identify a genre under which I would categorise this book. It’s not a war story, or a spy story, not a thriller or mystery, but more of a series of slices-of-life during the war. The setting shifts between Ottawa and Vichy France, before culminating in a chance meeting in London.
The end result is a strange cross between a war novel and Brigid Jones’ Diary. There are lots of little, historically curious slices of life, but it lacks a general narrative to make it interesting as a novel. Additionally, the “Home & Away” model is that there is one chapter that takes place in Ottawa, then the next takes place in Southern France, with the two stories eventually meeting. This model doesn’t actually work, as the Awaychapters are very short, without any real development of any characters.
That lack of character development is the real problem with the book, as the characters are all fairly flat. Arriving on stage, fulfilling a role to reflect upon the character of the protagonist, Frances, and then exiting stage left. This might have made for a more engaging story if Frances was more interesting, but she isn’t.
In the previous books in the series, The Underling, the Incrementalist, Carbon Copy, and Death by Misadventure, the city of Ottawa is a character as much as it is a setting, but here, the settings are work (in a few different offices), food (in a few different venues), and play (at a few friends’ homes).
The result is that the earlier books are fun narratives, and you can identify the writer’s enthusiasm for the story, but Home & Away lacks that enthusiasm and feels more like a letter home to reader, telling them about what’s going when there isn’t much left to say.
★★★☆☆
