Unrest by Gwen Tuinman
2025, Vintage Canada, 440 Pages, $25.95
19th Century Historical Fiction/Women’s Fiction
This is a story about a family living in Lowertown, the working-class Irish/French area of Ottawa (then called Bytown). Lowertown is down river from, and down the hill from Barack’s Hill, now Parliament Hill. South and west of the hill are the more affluent, protestant areas of town. The O’Dougherty family share a shack and suffer under the weight of poverty, and their own secrets and lies.
Seamus is the patriarch, but the least important of the four POV characters. Before moving to Bytown from County Cork in Ireland, he got engaged to Biddy, the second POV character. One day, Biddy’s sister, Mariah, the third POV character was attacked by dogs and he rescued her, and he later impregnated her, and she claimed that she was attacked by a man on the road. To hide this shame, the three of them went to Bytown, Biddy and Seamus adopted the baby, Thomas, the fourth POV character, and claimed to be the parents. As Thomas got older, Biddy put one and one together and understood that Seamus was the father. This is the heart of the family disfunction.
While in Bytown, Seamus is poor and miserable but does his best to look after the family within the limits of their poverty. He spends winters away, up the Ottawa River in a lumber camp. Biddy is mean to her sister who she resents, and Mariah suffers in silence. Thomas hates being born poor, and works as an apprentice Blacksmith until he runs in with the Shiners, an Irish organised crime group.
The four POV perspectives is an interesting technique, but not all four are equally interesting to me as a reader. Thomas’ story was interesting, but it kept getting cut short to focus on Seamus or Biddy, neither of whom were very interesting. Seamus was a worn down by years of precarious work and an inability to escape his lot. Biddy was a resentful shrew who was consumed by her resentment towards her husband, her sister, her children and her life. Mariah was slightly more interesting, but her lot seemed to be that of the martyr, piously suffering.
The story takes place in 1836-7 and focusses on the prelude to the Shiner’s War of Ottawa, a conflict between Irish and French working class as they competed for a limited number of jobs in the lumber and construction industries after the Rideau Canal project came to an end. Tuinman’s attention to detail for the setting was admirable, and she did get across an important element of Bytown that continues to this day, and that’s the physical distances of the different communities that make up the city. The story involved the characters trekking off to Goulburn, Nepean, Madawa, and mentioning other communities like Wright’s Town, the precursor to Hull. Ottawa is a community of villages that ended up being administratively conjoined for ease of governance, and many of these towns were socially disconnected from one another. A lot of the political machinations in the background involved getting council votes in far off communities, and this is a feature of municipal politics to this day.
Adding to the list of historical curiosities was the Bytown Rifles, a precursor to Ottawa Police Services. This was a Protestant volunteer militia that mustered when required to keep order, not investigate crime. There was no regular police force until 1855, and investigating property crime was the duty of the wronged party and their friends. The anarchic use of violence to keep public order was an interesting background feature to the story.
One final historical curiosity was that the main story (minus the epilogue) comes to an end in 1837, the year of the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. I liked that they weren’t even hinted at in this story. The rebellions were very local affairs and not very widespread across the Dominion, and the characters here had no knowledge of what was going on past the horizons of their own local worlds. Tuinman resisted the temptation to make her characters stand-ins for the world at the time, which shows maturity as a writer.
Overall, I liked the Thomas and Mariah parts of the story, but I found most of the minor characters to be weak. The Indigenous family seemed to have been thrown in there fairly randomly towards the end, but I found Mariah’s storyline in the lumber camp to be exciting, as with Thomas’ run-ins with the Shiners.
For Biddy and Mariah there was an underlying theme of a woman’s worth in the society of the day, about what they bring to a family in terms of the labour that they do in the home, the importance of beauty that had been stolen from Mariah just as her earrings were later on, and she struggles to get that beauty and value back.
Overall, I liked the book, even though I was not the target audience
★★★★☆
