In the dock
The literary prosecution of Robert Bourassa
GRAHAM FRASER
The Globe and Mail
Saturday July 16, 1994
EARLY on in the marathon reading of this mammoth two-volume account of Robert Bourassa’s tangle with the constitutional debate over two years, I imagined Quebec journalist Jean-Francois Lisee, whom I had once seen soberly and severely dissect Mordecai Richler on television, in lawyer’s robes. These two tomes were his basis for the prosecution of Bourassa: binders, neatly tabbed, of transcripts, accounts by witnesses, reconstructions of meetings. The sheer mass of these two books, the narrowness of their focus, and the first volume’s impact in Quebec are eloquent statements in themselves of the continuing intensity of Quebec’s self-absorption.