What do you think?
Rate this book
Turvey
Private Thomas Leadbeater Turvey is nobody’s idea of a capable recruit. Shifted from regimental pillar to post, Turvey tries and fails at every odd job in the army with a remarkable genius for mishap.
A casualty before he has a chance to see action, Turvey watches the maimed and dying return from the front; thus Earle Birney’s comic masterpiece becomes an unforgettable indictment of war.
Turvey won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1949.
From the Hardcover edition.
A casualty before he has a chance to see action, Turvey watches the maimed and dying return from the front; thus Earle Birney’s comic masterpiece becomes an unforgettable indictment of war.
Turvey won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1949.
From the Hardcover edition.
360 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
About the author
Earle Birney
40 books5 followersEarle Alfred Birney was a distinguished Canadian poet and novelist, who twice won the Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honor, for his poetry.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 22, 2017
This book tells of the mis-adventures of Private Turvey, of the Canadian Army, in World War Two. This humorous novel begins with Turvey's basic training in Toronto and deals with his efforts to get overseas to fight in the war, which takes a long time. Once there, he has to overcome more hurdles, which shows the complexity of the burocracy of war. As Turvey finally reaches Belgium and Holland, the effects of the war on the civilian population are shown in an understated and subtle way. For example, the author describes the view from Turvey's hospital window--children and adults blue with the cold, people pulling the canal barges instead of horses. In the last chapter he describes the homecoming of wounded soldiers with compassion and empathy.
March 14, 2023
I have always known Earle Birney as one of Canada's great poets, a writer of great creativity and imagination. And while I knew that he had written Turvey, a copy of the book hadn't crossed my path til recently at a used bookstore.
Turvey is a picaresque novel that tells the wartime story of Thomas Leadbetter "Topsy" Turvey, a naif and aimless wanderer through Depression-era Canada, who enlists in the Canadian Army with no ambition greater than to join the Kootenay Highlanders and join his friend Mac there.
It's not too much of a spoiler to tell you that he does eventually discover his friend Mac. That is just one happening in a sequence of adventures and misadventures that take on a comic and microscopically absurdist tone that explains why this book won the 1950 Leacock Medal for humour writing.
Turvey is an interesting book to contemplate from a distance of many decades from the Second World War. Birney is too smart a man and too good a writer to swallow the simple myths of wartime propaganda that would have filled his eyes and ears during the war years. And Turvey does not spare satirical criticism of the Army, the reasons for the war, and the way the war was fought on the side of the Allies. But by the same token, it's not an anti-war polemic either, and Turvey is no Billy Pilgrim.
Birney's love of sound and his use of verbatim capturing of dialogue and sounds in the environment around him will be familiar to lovers of his poetry, and may bring to mind his fellow poet e.e. cummings. His joy in the use of language as a tool of creation and play is as evident here as it is in his poems.
I suspect this would have been considered a daring work in the late 1940s. By the standards of the 21st century, its daring is not as apparent. But it is a valuable lens with which to look at both Canada in the Second World War and the psyche of literary post-war Canada.
Turvey is a picaresque novel that tells the wartime story of Thomas Leadbetter "Topsy" Turvey, a naif and aimless wanderer through Depression-era Canada, who enlists in the Canadian Army with no ambition greater than to join the Kootenay Highlanders and join his friend Mac there.
It's not too much of a spoiler to tell you that he does eventually discover his friend Mac. That is just one happening in a sequence of adventures and misadventures that take on a comic and microscopically absurdist tone that explains why this book won the 1950 Leacock Medal for humour writing.
Turvey is an interesting book to contemplate from a distance of many decades from the Second World War. Birney is too smart a man and too good a writer to swallow the simple myths of wartime propaganda that would have filled his eyes and ears during the war years. And Turvey does not spare satirical criticism of the Army, the reasons for the war, and the way the war was fought on the side of the Allies. But by the same token, it's not an anti-war polemic either, and Turvey is no Billy Pilgrim.
Birney's love of sound and his use of verbatim capturing of dialogue and sounds in the environment around him will be familiar to lovers of his poetry, and may bring to mind his fellow poet e.e. cummings. His joy in the use of language as a tool of creation and play is as evident here as it is in his poems.
I suspect this would have been considered a daring work in the late 1940s. By the standards of the 21st century, its daring is not as apparent. But it is a valuable lens with which to look at both Canada in the Second World War and the psyche of literary post-war Canada.
November 24, 2022
Interesting book. Earle Birney’s comic novel TURVEY is based on the author’s experiences in the Canadian Army during the Second World War. It follows the hapless and accident prone Thomas “Tops” Turvey as he enlists in the Army in the hopes of joining his friend Mac in the Kootenay Highland Regiment. He ends up subjected to military bureaucracy, never quite making it to the front, despite his best efforts. Birney, known primarily for his poetry not his prose, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour fir this novel. While TURVEY is quite funny at times, it is really more a work of satire than laugh-out-loud humour. The novel is really Kafka-esque, biting at the labyrinthine and ponderous weight of the military’s bureaucracy. It also reminds me a bit of classics like those of Chaucer and Cervantes. Private Turvey is very much on a journey, but an absurdly futile one as he gets bumped from unit to unit, job to job through the military, being subject to the same assessment tests over and over again, because his papers never seem to catch up with him. Turvey is a bit of a hapless hero. He is a man that wants to do right. He wants to be a loyal soldier, but he is forever prevented from doing do both by his often poor judgement, but more because he is but a cog in the wheel of the military machine.
April 16, 2020
A student in my school told me I should read this book. I read it in Grade 13 and found it quite quaint and hard to forget . . . worth reading.
July 19, 2014
Slightly humourous at times, but also tiresome as Turvey is shuttled around for a few years by the incompetent bureaucracy of the wartime army, making it to the scene of the fighting too late . Then comes a depressing, dark segment of the book (though the theme of bureaucracy continues to the end). Turvey was just too stupid for me to really feel connected, and the women of the book...well, let's just say that when they're not being treated as sexual objects, they're being treated as stereotypes. I'd have loved to have loved this Canadian treatment of the subject, but alas, Catch-22 did it far better.
February 7, 2011
Enjoyable book with interesting vernacular and colloquialisms, a hapless protagonist, and a madcap plot that must have been rather unique in a 1949 war novel. Earle Birney ends the book on a rather sobering note, which is interesting... did he change the tone to preserve the glory of war or to pay respects to those consumed in it?
Worth reading: subtly humorous, eccentric cast, WWII – know what you're getting into.
Worth reading: subtly humorous, eccentric cast, WWII – know what you're getting into.
November 17, 2012
I enjoyed it...kind if a Canadian Catch-22, but with an endearing hero. Recommended!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews