In many ways, Somebody Else’s War is a novel about inertia, emotional, civic, and generational. It unfolds in a small Canadian town where nothing much happens and then keeps happening. The war referenced in the title looms mostly in the distance: Vietnam, of course, but also every war that came before it. But what’s startling and quietly disarming is how David Roy Montgomerie Johnson uses that distance. This is not a war novel, not in the traditional sense. It’s a book about what war leaves behind when the headlines move on, how it echoes, not with bombs or bullets, but in unpaid bills, missed phone calls, empty beds, and awkward silences across the dinner table.
It’s not about the fire. It’s about the smoke.
Set in 1968 in the fictional Canadian town of Newport on the Lake, Johnson’s book takes place in a year of extraordinary global upheaval, civil rights, assassinations, riots, elections, rockets, and television violence, but he plants his flag firmly in the provincial. He writes about cranky mayors, retired cops, bar fights, broken appliances, and two brothers named Not Too and Not Very, who attempt to throw each other through a window. And yet, through these strange and often comic domesticities, he paints a portrait of a culture trying (and mostly failing) to understand what it means to move on.
At the centre of it all is Captain Sammy Enfield, a former Marine turned reluctant police chief, who shuffles through his days with a mixture of trauma, decency, and quiet dread. Sammy isn’t a dramatic man, nor does he seem interested in becoming one. But his dreams betray him, flashes of the Pacific theatre and Korea bleed into his present, and the news from Vietnam sits just close enough to make him flinch. His son is seventeen. That number alone carries more tension than any gunshot could.
And it’s not just Sammy who’s stuck. The entire town lives in a sort of suspended animation. A place that used to be a resort destination for wealthy Buffalonians, it now slouches toward irrelevance with a shrug. The courthouse is still impressive but mostly empty. The police station has been downgraded to a glorified broom closet. The town’s flagship diner serves the same orders every morning to the same characters with the same recycled gripes. It’s like watching a stage play where no one’s sure whether the second act ever started.
There’s an undeniable melancholy to this, but Johnson isn’t mining for tragedy. If anything, he seems drawn to the absurdity of decay. And he has a genuine affection for these people, their bickering, their small-town superstitions, and their stubborn refusal to evolve. He renders their conversations in fully textured, naturalistic rhythms. They talk like real people, sometimes stupid, sometimes profound, often both at once.
Take the recurring figure of Tubby Tuberville, an aging officer whose real job is less about law enforcement and more about remembering who got into a fight at The Loyalist bar and which tractors are missing from which yards. Tubby is a kind of time capsule: bitter, decent, occasionally competent, and thoroughly worn down. And he’s fine with that. There’s a long, dark humor in the way Tubby approaches his own obsolescence, as though he’s quietly proud of how unremarkable his life has become.
But if Tubby is the town’s embodiment of quiet resignation, Gunner Simpson (mysterious, dignified, possibly ex-intelligence) is its emotional core. He’s one of the few characters who seems to have genuinely grown through his pain. He walks with his son, Boy, through the snow and speaks in measured truths. Not platitudes. Not speechifying. Just the kind of moral language you wish more people used when talking to children. Gunner is the man war didn’t break. Not because he escaped it but because he refused to let it define everything.
What’s especially moving about Somebody Else’s War is how it handles intergenerational weight. Becky, Sammy’s estranged wife, delivers one of the novel’s most haunting monologues while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. She recounts, almost offhandedly, that in five generations, the men of the Enfield family have never met their fathers. One by one, they marched off to war and died before seeing the next branch of the tree bloom. Her son, Warren, is the first to break the pattern, and she’s terrified he won’t survive long enough to make it matter. That passage is devastating not because of its drama but because of its clarity. There’s no finger-pointing. Just a mother reckoning with a history written in blood, she didn’t spill.
Of course, the book isn’t just sad. Johnson has a remarkable ability to fold dark comedy into the folds of daily life. The town’s obsession with its crumbling clock tower, for instance, is so perfectly calibrated, simultaneously a symbol of local pride, bureaucratic impotence, and slapstick inevitability. Trucks keep crashing into it. The clock doesn’t keep time. And yet, nobody wants to move it. Why would they? If it’s broken, at least it’s their broken thing.
That contradiction, between knowing something’s obsolete and still cherishing it, runs through every layer of the novel. People make bad decisions. They hold grudges. They dream small. But Johnson never treats them like punchlines. There’s something generous in his portrayal of these flawed people clinging to half-finished lives. They are, in their own small ways, survivors.
It’s tempting to compare this book to something like Olive Kitteridge or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, those tender cartographies of community life, but Johnson’s voice has its own register. More sardonic, perhaps. More irreverent. Less interested in resolution. He doesn’t tidy up. He lingers. Sometimes, a scene ends without a climax. Sometimes, a conversation drifts into silence. But that’s precisely the point. Not everything resolves. Not every war ends when the guns stop.
In the end, Somebody Else’s War is a meditation on how we live in the aftermath, not just of battles, but of love, of ambition, of purpose. What do people do when the fires go out, and the visitors stop coming? How do we make sense of our own histories when they’re only partly ours?
Johnson doesn’t offer answers. He offers voices. Places. Moments. And in doing so, he gives us something that feels increasingly rare in fiction: the complicated texture of the unremarkable.
Because, as this book quietly insists, the wars we survive, emotional, generational, invisible, are never really over. We just learn to live among their ghosts.