Paul Theroux begins this book getting fined $500 at the border by an immigration officer named Sweeney, and the incident sets the tone perfectly: Canada, land of the politely relentless. He promises it may be his last travel book — global overtourism has soured him, and he thinks most travel writing is rubbish — then proceeds to drive thousands of miles from Massachusetts to the western provinces anyway. The contradiction is the point. Theroux the grouch is more alive on the road than anywhere else. The anchor of the journey is Yamaska, Quebec, where a 17th-century Frenchman named Antoine Theroux planted the family name on this continent. The village still has a Rue Theroux, still has a dozen Theroux families, and the mayor presents Paul with a certificate of honour. It's the most emotionally grounded section of the book — a genuinely curious man discovering that belonging can be geographic and ancestral rather than national. The long chapter of family history that follows will test readers who didn't come for genealogy, but it earns its place. From there, Theroux swings west and the book opens up. He watches the Ottawa trucker protests — 'a mob of truckers and their huge vehicles occupying and violating a handsome city' — with the fascinated detachment of someone who understands populist rage without endorsing it. Trump's threats to annex Canada as the 51st state produce defiance rather than panic: Maple Leaf flags everywhere, 'Canada — Not for Sale' T-shirts, and eventually a Mark Carney election win over the fancied populist. Theroux the American is an awkward guest at this particular moment, and he knows it. The book's most serious weight falls on Indigenous history, and Theroux carries it without flinching. The Cree and other First Nations emerge not as backdrop but as the central moral subject of modern Canada — 'aliens in their own land,' dispossessed by British and French colonialism and still waiting for meaningful reparation. The details he accumulates are quietly devastating: 'starlight tours' in which police left Indigenous men in remote locations in freezing weather to die; Indian residential schools with electric chairs wired to punish children; 250 children buried in unmarked graves at a single British Columbia school; the last such school shutting only in 1997. These passages are where the book stops being a road trip and becomes something harder to put down. The structure is loosely picaresque — budget motels, cheap diners, chance conversations with foresters, pig farmers, lobster fishers, moose hunters. It's a hit-and-miss method by Theroux's own admission, and some chapters deliver less than their setup promises. The immigration chapters — Canada's population expanding by over a million in 2022, Theroux observing Filipino, Sikh, and Somali communities living as 'unmelted migrants' in 'ethno-bubbles' — are observationally honest but analytically thin. He sees the tension clearly; he diagnoses it less so. The novelists he summons — Richler, Laurence, Atwood, Toews — illuminate the terrain better than his own sociological commentary sometimes does. The encounter with Jan Morris's son in Edmonton is the kind of detour that either delights or infuriates depending on your appetite for Theroux's literary network. Morris, he notes archly, wrote about Canada without ever 'resorted to the road, never camped, never roughed it' — a pointed distinction that tells you exactly where Theroux stands in the tradition of travel writing. He is of the school that believes suffering is epistemically productive, that you don't know a place until you've been cold and bored in it. At 85 and after 11 previous travel books, Theroux remains a genuinely alert witness. The book ends with him rejuvenated rather than exhausted, already planning the Yukon, Hudson Bay, Labrador. That energy is real and it's contagious. True North is not his best work — the structure sags in places and the immigration analysis needed another draft — but it contains some of his most morally serious writing, and the Indigenous history sections alone are worth the price.
