[In the following review, Richler calls The Impossible Railway a "considerable triumph," praising Berton for his ability to make a complex story "readable."]

Canada, threatened within by French Canadian separatists and without by rampaging American investment, is presently in a truculent and soul-searching mood. Its writers, their nationalist zeal often outstripping their talent, are bent on mythmaking. Turned inward, they are prospecting the past for those heroic tales that helped forge the nation or at least define how it differs from the other, sometimes insufferably overshadowing, America.

In this, as in any stake-claiming race, many of the searchers, ill-equipped, are inevitably panning fool's gold. Others are salting shallow pit-heads, inflating the stock for nationalistic consumption. But a few are surfacing with valuable, even essential, mythological ore.

Among them, the indefatigable Pierre Berton is unexcelled. Following Klondike, his compulsive account of the gold rush, he has struck an even richer vein a veritable bonanza, with The Impossible Railway, the saga, richly detailed (yet never at the sacrifice of its narrative drive) of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. A marvelous story in its own right, something of a cliffhanger, it anticipates, as Berton readily grasps without belaboring the point, the major problem that bedevils Canada even now: American domination.

The Canadian Pacific Railway, the longest in the world, was undertaken in 1871, when Canada was only four shaky years old, its population no more than four million. Its construction, initially promised in order to lure British Columbia, then still a colony, into the new Confederation, was the surpassing vision of a brilliant, charming, but alcoholic Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald. It was also almost his ruin, temporarily washing him out of office on a wave of bribery and swindles, culminating in the Pacific Scandal.

The railway remained essential, however, if Canada, comprised of isolated settlements with conflicting interests, was to be knit into a nation. It was, like Sir John A. himself, resurrected. It had to be built if it were to become possible for Canadians to journey from Atlantic to Pacific without being obliged to dip dependently into the United States.

It was impractical, a seemingly economic enterprise, ever teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and threatening to sink the Government with it. But it was also absolutely necessary if Canada was to opt for true independence, piercing impassable Selkirks, and so transforming itself from a nest of settlements on the St. Lawrence lowlands into a nation that spanned two oceans. And Sir John A., a Yankee hater born, was determined that it would be an all-Canadian enterprise. "We shall not be trampled upon and ridden over," he declared, "as we have been in the past, by foreign capitalists."

And yet—and yet—though this impossible project was dominated by the industrious Scots of Montreal, the unrivaled manipulators of the great banks and financial houses, it was seen through, all along the line, by American contractors. They were the engineers.

And, in a tale that abounds with outsize characters, Rocky Mountain surveyors of astonishing courage and eccentricity, imaginative financiers with unflinching nerve, adventurers, opportunists, and even a saintly French Canadian priest, the largest and easily the most important is the American engineer of German and Dutch extraction, William Cornelius Van Horne, who did in fact eventually become a Canadian, and was knighted in 1894. The fascinating Van Horne was rather more than the driving, ebullient engineer who, miraculously, built the 2,500 mile railway in less than five years. He was also a gourmet, all-night poker player, violinist and astute geologist. A most appealing Victorian. Years after the railway was completed, he said: "I get all I can; I drink all I can; I smoke all I can, and I don't give a damn for anything."

It is Pierre Berton's considerable triumph that, working from primary sources, unpublished diaries, and letters as well as public documents, he has rendered a horrendously complex story so readable, moving with ease from Parliament Hill to the Riel Rebellion, from the boardrooms of financial houses to the end of track, where the Irish navvies, the Swedes, the French-Canadian and Chinese coolies were being conned by camp following whiskey-peddlers and whores.

If the building of the C.P.R. is a story rich in political chicanery, sharp dealing and profiteering, it is, for all that, heroic. One of the great railway and nation-building stories told, warts and all, with the gusto it so richly deserves.