Paul Theroux’s Canadian Journey: Family Roots and a Mood of Betrayal

When Paul Theroux, the 85‑year‑old chronicler of road trips and strange encounters, announced his latest book – True North: On the Road in Canada – the literary world expected another collection of witty observations about maple‑scented highways and polite strangers.

What he delivered, however, feels more like a family scrapbook than a typical travelogue. Theroux spends months driving from the Atlantic breezes of Newfoundland to the rain‑soaked forests of British Columbia, but the journey is anchored in a tiny Québec village called Yamaska, where his great‑great‑grandfather Antoine first set foot in 1707.

“I knew almost nothing about Antoine,” Theroux admits in our conversation, chuckling at the gaps in his own genealogy. The man was a Gascon teenager from Verdun‑sur‑Garonne, barely twenty, who didn’t even speak the French spoken in Québec – he spoke the dialect of southwestern France. He hitchhiked, in a manner of speaking, with a larger group of fellow Gascons, among them the legendary de la Mothe Cadillac, founder of Detroit.

Antoine’s story quickly turns into a saga of colonial conflict. He fought under Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, during the latter’s final campaign against the Onondaga people. Two thousand soldiers, a grizzled septuagenarian general, and a punitive expedition that ended in a “wise” retreat – the First Nations simply vanished from the battlefield, leaving the French forces to count their losses in silence.

After the wars, Antoine settled down, married, and became a farmer in Yamaska. He died there in 1759, the very year Quebec fell to the British. “Three hundred years later, my family is still here, still farming, still speaking French,” Theroux says, a hint of wonder in his voice. “That’s not an American story. I can’t think of an American family that has stayed put for three centuries, doing the same work on the same land.”

The realization that his own bloodline has survived the upheavals of empire, rebellion, and modernity gave Theroux a rare, almost reverent pause in his otherwise restless travel narrative. He describes the experience as “wonderful and sobering,” because while the land has remained, the people who once fled Québec for New England – his own relatives among them – illustrate a different kind of migration, one driven by scarcity rather than adventure.

Beyond the personal, Theroux cannot escape the broader political climate. The current trade spat and border delays have made many Canadians feel a “mood of betrayal” toward the United States, a sentiment he hears echoed in cafés from Toronto to Victoria. “If only Americans understood the patience, the quiet endurance of Canadians, perhaps the bitterness would soften,” he remarks, noting that the very same neighbors who once helped shape his ancestors’ lives now seem distant.

True North, therefore, reads like a dual memoir: part road‑trip chronicle, part family history, part commentary on a strained north‑south relationship. Theroux’s prose is still witty, still observant, but there is a deeper thread of melancholy that ties each highway stop to his lineage and to the lingering sense that Canada has been taken for granted.

For readers who love travel writing, the book offers vivid snapshots – a fresh‑caught salmon on the Yukon, the neon glow of Winnipeg’s winter festivals, a quiet sunrise over the Bay of Fundy. For those looking for something more, it offers an invitation to look back at the roots that hold us, even when the world feels like it’s shifting under our wheels.