Linden MacIntyre
Author of The Bishop's Man
About the Author
Series
Works by Linden MacIntyre
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Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- MacIntyre, Linden
- Birthdate
- 1943-05-29
- Gender
- male
- Education
- St. Francis Xavier University (BA)
- Occupations
- journalist
- Organizations
- Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
- Awards and honors
- eight Gemini Awards,
International Emmy Award - Relationships
- Off, Carol (wife)
- Short biography
- One of three children of Dan Rory MacIntyre and Alice Donohue, he was raised in Port Hastings, Nova Scotia. As a miner, his father was rarely at home. MacIntyre has said, "The old fellow decided the family would stay in the community and he would go away and stay as long as it took. ... My mother was a teacher and my sister and I stayed with her.” [1]
After high school, MacIntyre moved to Antigonish, Nova Scotia where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Francis Xavier University in 1964. He also studied at St. Mary's University and the University of King's College in Halifax. From 1964 to 1967 he worked for the Halifax Herald as a parliamentary reporter in Ottawa. He continued in the same role with the Financial Times of Canada from 1967 to 1970. He was drawn back to Cape Breton after the death of his father in 1970 and for the next six years he lived there and worked as a correspondent for the Chronicle Herald.
He joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Halifax in 1976 and for three years he hosted a regional public affairs show called The MacIntyre File. It was while with this program that he launched a successful legal challenge before the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia over access to affidavits and documents relating to search warrants. Later heard before the Supreme Court of Canada, the successful suit was a landmark case which set a precedent in support of public and media access to information in Canada.[2]
In 1980, MacIntyre moved to Toronto, where he still resides, to work as a producer and journalist on CBC’s new flagship news program, The Journal. This appointment took him around the world preparing documentary reports on international affairs, preparing such notable features as "Dirty Sky, Dying Water" (about acid rain). Various jobs at the CBC through the eighties culminated in his appointment in 1990 as co-host of the weekly newsmagazine the fifth estate, with which he is still involved. In addition, he is a frequent guest host of The Current on CBC Radio One - Nationality
- Canada
- Birthplace
- St Lawrence, Newfoundland, Canada
- Places of residence
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Port Hastings, Nova Scotia, Canada
Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada - Associated Place (for map)
- Canada
Members
Reviews
To read The Bishop’s Man, by Linden MacIntyre, is to come to an understanding about nuance, patience and the sometimes ambiguity of knowledge.
The novel is set in the late 1990s of Cape Breton, at a time when the Catholic Church is under siege both from within and without, and when Canada’s fisheries are collapsing. Come into this Father Duncan MacAskill, known among his colleagues as the ‘Exorcist’, the damage-control man for the Bishop of Antigonish.
Duncan himself is in need of show more damage control, burned out, over-stressed, searching for his own relevance in a Church with diminishing relevance. There is very much the feeling of shadows in this novel, of whispers in the wind, of the reluctance to acknowledge hurt, tragedy, and responsibility. I know of many editors, even writers, who would have condemned the first half of this novel as too introspective, too slow, that the character of Duncan MacAskill is too remote.
They would be wrong. As was I. What Linden MacIntyre creates with this cool, distant approach is a fragile foundation he then, in the last few chapters, ruthlessly, and yet with grace, rips out from under the reader’s metaphorical feet and leaves you numb, in my case weeping. In a story so reserved in its emotional impact, it creates a thunderous impact in the end so that the only word left to describe this novel is memorable. show less
The novel is set in the late 1990s of Cape Breton, at a time when the Catholic Church is under siege both from within and without, and when Canada’s fisheries are collapsing. Come into this Father Duncan MacAskill, known among his colleagues as the ‘Exorcist’, the damage-control man for the Bishop of Antigonish.
Duncan himself is in need of show more damage control, burned out, over-stressed, searching for his own relevance in a Church with diminishing relevance. There is very much the feeling of shadows in this novel, of whispers in the wind, of the reluctance to acknowledge hurt, tragedy, and responsibility. I know of many editors, even writers, who would have condemned the first half of this novel as too introspective, too slow, that the character of Duncan MacAskill is too remote.
They would be wrong. As was I. What Linden MacIntyre creates with this cool, distant approach is a fragile foundation he then, in the last few chapters, ruthlessly, and yet with grace, rips out from under the reader’s metaphorical feet and leaves you numb, in my case weeping. In a story so reserved in its emotional impact, it creates a thunderous impact in the end so that the only word left to describe this novel is memorable. show less
THE WINTER WIVES is the eighth Linden MacIntyre book I have read, and I have loved every one of them. MacIntyre's latest offering is, like all of his fiction, a largely character-driven novel. And it is also set in the author's own home territory of Nova Scotia, with its narrator, Byron, a native of the small community of Malignant Cove, who grew up lobstering with his widowed mother. Byron (real name Angus) is a nickname he got in high school from Peggy Winter, one of the Winter sisters show more (Peggy and Annie) because, like Lord Byron, he limped. Byron's limp, however, is not due to a birth defect, like the poet's (who was born with a club foot), but was caused by a childhood accident, which is itself central to the plot.
Besides Byron, there are three other main characters here - the Winter sisters, who become the the Winter wives of the title, when Annie marries Byron, and Peggy marries Allan Chase, the fourth character, who meets Byron at University, and becomes his lifelong, and remotely mysterious, friend. Allan, called "the great Chase," due to his football prowess in college, soon drops out of school and disappear into a shadowy career in crime which takes him all over the U.S. and Mexico, and finally brings him back to Toronto, a seemingly successful and wealthy businessman. Byron, in the meantime, finishes college and law school and joins a small firm in Halifax. What happens over the the next thirty-plus years shows us that things - and people - are often not what they seem. When Allan approaches Byron to become a part of his shadowy criminal empire, Byron is initially reluctant, but, because both the Winter sisters are already a part of Allan's enterprise, he finally joins the "family business." Then Allan suffers a stroke, the police come to call, a mysterious "Russian" shows up, and money laundering and offshore bank accounts come into play. And Byron's mother descends rapidly into dementia, causing him to wonder if he himself could be affected. And there is too the longtime unrequited love he feels for Peggy, his sister-in-law and Allan's wife.
What may sound like a stew of characters, events and circumstances all works amazingly well, and kept me up reading into the wee hours, to an ending that left me satisfied, but also wondering if there might me more, if Byron might show up in another year or two in MacIntyre's next book. I hope so. Because I love the way this guy writes. My very highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
Besides Byron, there are three other main characters here - the Winter sisters, who become the the Winter wives of the title, when Annie marries Byron, and Peggy marries Allan Chase, the fourth character, who meets Byron at University, and becomes his lifelong, and remotely mysterious, friend. Allan, called "the great Chase," due to his football prowess in college, soon drops out of school and disappear into a shadowy career in crime which takes him all over the U.S. and Mexico, and finally brings him back to Toronto, a seemingly successful and wealthy businessman. Byron, in the meantime, finishes college and law school and joins a small firm in Halifax. What happens over the the next thirty-plus years shows us that things - and people - are often not what they seem. When Allan approaches Byron to become a part of his shadowy criminal empire, Byron is initially reluctant, but, because both the Winter sisters are already a part of Allan's enterprise, he finally joins the "family business." Then Allan suffers a stroke, the police come to call, a mysterious "Russian" shows up, and money laundering and offshore bank accounts come into play. And Byron's mother descends rapidly into dementia, causing him to wonder if he himself could be affected. And there is too the longtime unrequited love he feels for Peggy, his sister-in-law and Allan's wife.
What may sound like a stew of characters, events and circumstances all works amazingly well, and kept me up reading into the wee hours, to an ending that left me satisfied, but also wondering if there might me more, if Byron might show up in another year or two in MacIntyre's next book. I hope so. Because I love the way this guy writes. My very highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
Linden McIntyre’s troubling, captivating novel, The Winter Wives, takes the reader on a murky voyage through a world of shifting allegiances, fluid identities, moral ambiguities, hidden agendas, and plenty of closely guarded secrets. The story begins in the present day, with long-time friends and business partners Byron and Allan on the golf course. This is Byron’s story, and he describes with distressing immediacy the moment when Allan collapses at the tee. Allan has suffered a stroke, show more an event that not only sets in motion everything that follows, but which also brings the notion of mortality alarmingly into focus for everyone involved. Allan and Byron have known each other for decades, having met while both were attending an east-coast university. It’s an unlikely alliance. Allan—brash, athletic, ambitious—later quits university and embarks on a business career, an enterprise that seems to involve a veneer of legitimate undertakings masking some truly unsavoury activities, but which nonetheless makes him rich and takes him around the world. Byron—unassuming, smart, self-conscious about his limp, which is the result of a childhood accident—obtains a law degree but stays in Nova Scotia to nurse his mother through her struggle with Alzheimer’s. Early in his career, disillusioned with a position at a law firm that’s leading nowhere, Byron allows Allan to recruit him into the business. The other partners in the story are Annie (married to Byron) and Peggy (married to Allan). They are sisters and, by profession, accountants. Both work for Allan. Both seem to know more than they let on to Byron.
Byron, our narrator, is shaped and haunted by the accident that scarred him for life. The precise circumstances of what happened are elusive: the violence of the incident has stayed with him, but his recall is limited to a few flickering, fragmented images. He has no one to ask since his mother refused to talk about it, and, with her passing, all the participants other than him are dead. In the absence of certainty, he’s left with suspicion and innuendo.
McIntyre’s novel chronicles, over many years, the complex interweaving of business affairs, money, physical attraction, and emotional commitment among the four main players. Trust is an ever-present motif in this narrative journey, the erosion of which leads to intrigue and betrayal.
As time goes by, physical decline rears its ugly head: Allan’s stroke and mental impairment, Byron’s memory troubles and his growing fear that he’ll share his mother’s fate and lose himself to dementia. But even when all seems lost, circumstances can change, the balance of power can shift, and as Allan’s business empire crumbles and damaging secrets are dragged into the light of day, Byron finds there’s an advantage to be had in standing back and letting people believe what they want to believe. As we approach an inevitable reckoning, Peggy and Annie seem to have gained control, but have they really?
Linden MacIntyre’s novels are populated by flawed characters who act selfishly, who are weak, who drink too much, and who regret their actions when it’s far too late to make any difference. The Winter Wives follows a similar pattern. The world of this novel harbours shocking secrets in abundance and most of the relationships are built on lies. For these people, deception is a way of life. It may be lurid, but it makes for an extravagant, large-scale entertainment that leaves us pondering what it means to really know another person. show less
Byron, our narrator, is shaped and haunted by the accident that scarred him for life. The precise circumstances of what happened are elusive: the violence of the incident has stayed with him, but his recall is limited to a few flickering, fragmented images. He has no one to ask since his mother refused to talk about it, and, with her passing, all the participants other than him are dead. In the absence of certainty, he’s left with suspicion and innuendo.
McIntyre’s novel chronicles, over many years, the complex interweaving of business affairs, money, physical attraction, and emotional commitment among the four main players. Trust is an ever-present motif in this narrative journey, the erosion of which leads to intrigue and betrayal.
As time goes by, physical decline rears its ugly head: Allan’s stroke and mental impairment, Byron’s memory troubles and his growing fear that he’ll share his mother’s fate and lose himself to dementia. But even when all seems lost, circumstances can change, the balance of power can shift, and as Allan’s business empire crumbles and damaging secrets are dragged into the light of day, Byron finds there’s an advantage to be had in standing back and letting people believe what they want to believe. As we approach an inevitable reckoning, Peggy and Annie seem to have gained control, but have they really?
Linden MacIntyre’s novels are populated by flawed characters who act selfishly, who are weak, who drink too much, and who regret their actions when it’s far too late to make any difference. The Winter Wives follows a similar pattern. The world of this novel harbours shocking secrets in abundance and most of the relationships are built on lies. For these people, deception is a way of life. It may be lurid, but it makes for an extravagant, large-scale entertainment that leaves us pondering what it means to really know another person. show less
Well, I'm caught up on Linden MacIntyre's novels again. THE ONLY CAFE is his fifth and I've loved every one of them. MacIntyre is a bestselling author in his native Canada, but not all that famous down here in the USA, although I think his second novel, THE BISHOP'S MAN, made a pretty sizable splash.
Patience is always required for MacIntyre's fiction, as he spins some pretty complicated plots, and THE ONLY CAFE is no exception, because it spans decades and a couple generations. Young Cyril show more Cormier is a very junior reporter for a major Canadian news network in Toronto (think CBC), trying to unravel the secrets of his late father's mysterious life - and death (if he is indeed dead). His father, Pierre, had emigrated from Lebanon to Canada as a very young man, changed his name from Haddad to Cormier, got educated, and became a very successful lawyer with a huge global mining conglomerate. Along the way he divorced Cyril's mother, Aggie, and remarried Lois. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances, when his boat blew up in a tiny harbor off Cape Breton. Declared legally dead after five years, his will contained an odd codicil about a small bar, The Only Café, on the wrong side of Toronto, and a man named only as Ari.
So - Cyril is trying to figure all this out as he begins a new job, assigned to research the possible threat posed by a burgeoning population of immigrants from the Middle East. He meets this 'Ari,' and gradually learns of his father's possible involvement with a militia group implicated in the bloody massacre of thousands of people in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982. The story is filled with flashbacks, and shifts alternately between Cyril's and Pierre's stories, and there is much detail and history here about the bloody civil wars in Lebanon, and how Syria and Israel used Beirut as a battleground.
You see? Complicated. Patience and close attention to detail are absolutely required. But, accustomed to MacIntyre's work, I was ready, I paid attention, and I was hooked. Here is just a small sample of the kind of attention-grabbing, horrifying, grim detail employed here, this time from Pierre's part of the story, as he remembered the aftermath of the massacre in Beirut -
"Now Saturday, weaving through another place of carnage, there is only silence, accentuated by the hum of insects. The dead are everywhere, individuals and groups; families; young men sprawled along a wall where they were executed; old men, throats cut; children, their heads cleaved by blows from axes; the silent curiosity of lifeless faces; small bodies; large bodies; bodies blackened by long hours in the sun; blackened by the swarms of flies; some still bleeding from a recent knife or axe or bullet; babies; women; dogs; horses. Pierre will ask himself repeatedly, sometimes in astonishment: horses? But he remembered horses. Mostly he remembered his indifference, the self-preserving numbness that sets in after normal senses have shut down."
Or here, another sample, this time of Cyril's state of mind, as he waits, now in hiding, and afraid for his own life -
"It was a Saturday morning. He stared out over the dismal city, rain streaking down the glass balcony door … The weather channel informed him that the temperature was plus two degrees Celsius. There could be sleet. He couldn't watch the news channels anymore. He didn't trust what anyone was telling him … Everything he saw and heard seemed false, fabricated and performed."
Interesting how relevant this comment about the news channels seems, especially today.
I learned a lot about the wars and turmoil in the Mideast, and how far back it all stretches, decades and generations, all the blood feuds and ethnic and religious hatreds. So I was not really surprised when I read MacIntyre's comment in the Acknowledgements stating, "This work of fiction is based on real events." Indeed. You can Google things like the Sabra and Shatila camps and the massacres of September 1982. They happened. And Linden MacIntyre has brought it all to life in the most dramatic and chilling fashion imaginable. This is a damn good book, filled with difficult truths. My highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
Patience is always required for MacIntyre's fiction, as he spins some pretty complicated plots, and THE ONLY CAFE is no exception, because it spans decades and a couple generations. Young Cyril show more Cormier is a very junior reporter for a major Canadian news network in Toronto (think CBC), trying to unravel the secrets of his late father's mysterious life - and death (if he is indeed dead). His father, Pierre, had emigrated from Lebanon to Canada as a very young man, changed his name from Haddad to Cormier, got educated, and became a very successful lawyer with a huge global mining conglomerate. Along the way he divorced Cyril's mother, Aggie, and remarried Lois. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances, when his boat blew up in a tiny harbor off Cape Breton. Declared legally dead after five years, his will contained an odd codicil about a small bar, The Only Café, on the wrong side of Toronto, and a man named only as Ari.
So - Cyril is trying to figure all this out as he begins a new job, assigned to research the possible threat posed by a burgeoning population of immigrants from the Middle East. He meets this 'Ari,' and gradually learns of his father's possible involvement with a militia group implicated in the bloody massacre of thousands of people in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982. The story is filled with flashbacks, and shifts alternately between Cyril's and Pierre's stories, and there is much detail and history here about the bloody civil wars in Lebanon, and how Syria and Israel used Beirut as a battleground.
You see? Complicated. Patience and close attention to detail are absolutely required. But, accustomed to MacIntyre's work, I was ready, I paid attention, and I was hooked. Here is just a small sample of the kind of attention-grabbing, horrifying, grim detail employed here, this time from Pierre's part of the story, as he remembered the aftermath of the massacre in Beirut -
"Now Saturday, weaving through another place of carnage, there is only silence, accentuated by the hum of insects. The dead are everywhere, individuals and groups; families; young men sprawled along a wall where they were executed; old men, throats cut; children, their heads cleaved by blows from axes; the silent curiosity of lifeless faces; small bodies; large bodies; bodies blackened by long hours in the sun; blackened by the swarms of flies; some still bleeding from a recent knife or axe or bullet; babies; women; dogs; horses. Pierre will ask himself repeatedly, sometimes in astonishment: horses? But he remembered horses. Mostly he remembered his indifference, the self-preserving numbness that sets in after normal senses have shut down."
Or here, another sample, this time of Cyril's state of mind, as he waits, now in hiding, and afraid for his own life -
"It was a Saturday morning. He stared out over the dismal city, rain streaking down the glass balcony door … The weather channel informed him that the temperature was plus two degrees Celsius. There could be sleet. He couldn't watch the news channels anymore. He didn't trust what anyone was telling him … Everything he saw and heard seemed false, fabricated and performed."
Interesting how relevant this comment about the news channels seems, especially today.
I learned a lot about the wars and turmoil in the Mideast, and how far back it all stretches, decades and generations, all the blood feuds and ethnic and religious hatreds. So I was not really surprised when I read MacIntyre's comment in the Acknowledgements stating, "This work of fiction is based on real events." Indeed. You can Google things like the Sabra and Shatila camps and the massacres of September 1982. They happened. And Linden MacIntyre has brought it all to life in the most dramatic and chilling fashion imaginable. This is a damn good book, filled with difficult truths. My highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
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