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BIOGRAPHY
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Chris McNaught is a Toronto-born, Ottawa writer, lecturer and lawyer. He was educated at Neuchatel Jr. College (Switzerland), Trinity College (U. of Toronto, Hons. Classics), and the Faculty of Law (U. of Toronto). He is married, with three children. His other passions are water polo and watercolours. The Ambulance Driver is his first novel. A second is just completed, The Keli Dowry, based on his time as diver on an American dig in Greece during the Colonels’ dictatorship in the 60s and 70s. A third, Tatiana, a story of the new European republics, is on the boards.
Influences
The pull towards literary & military history passed from my great-grandfather, Hon. Colonel, Queen's Own Rifles (WWI), organizer of a unit of armoured cars for the Front, to my grandfather, Captain and Adjutant, 84th Battn., CEF (WWI), a writer of short stories from the conflict and a route-marcher in 1915 through the very lanes of Surrey, England, near where the 'ambulance driver' now lies; then to my late father, a WO in the Ordnance Corps (WWII), and subsequently, academic, and author of the Penguin History of Canada.
A fascination with early photography and doing water-colours from, for example, Brady photos from the (U.S.) Civil War, or archival shots from WWI, amplified all the above, focusing my imagination on those 'frozen' moments in time - when you stare into Lincoln's eyes, or marvel at the cheerful smile on a 'Bluebird's (WWI nursing sister) tired face at Ypres.
Like many, I'm a part-time dweller in the lands of favourite poets and authors, as therapy against the stress and banality of the every-day, re-connecting with images and emotions which once captured the inner self. So… which writers still 'hover' about for me?
John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps, Prester John), Robert Louis Stevenson
(Kidnapped, Treasure Island), and Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn) are peerless adventurers. John LeCarre (the 'Karla' trilogy, The Russia House), Graham Greene (Brighton Rock, The Third Man, The Tenth Man), John Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row) all convey the deception and betrayal of human will and desire, in tandem with the sting of irony. As for poets: Tennyson, R.L.Stevenson, A.E. Housman, Kipling, and Wallace Stevens, linger constantly; P.G.Wodehouse (the Jeeves series), Stephen Leacock (Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town), and John Mortimer (Voyage Round My Father, the Rumpole series) offer cerebral yet hearty laughter for the soul.
An early spell in Europe, the Aegean and the near-East, and a very classical education - Classics (Greek & Latin) followed by law (the ethereal, crimped by the pedestrian!?) shaped my outlook (to the extent I have any discernible 'philosophy'): a vague sense that things are destined, or supremely orchestrated in a subtle way, but that we, as individuals, do have the freedom to 'choose,' or stumble onto, the path leading to our fate or fortune.
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