Except, according to Richards, William Maxwell Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, was a bad boy, a “scallywag.” His hero was John Calvin, the antithesis of liberal Protestantism, with his iron belief in predestination and his virtual certainty that most people born on this earth are numbered among the reprobate before they ever draw breath. Beaverbrook seems not to have adhered to any form of Christianity in later life, but Calvin shadowed him the way the Methodist belief that it pays to do good stuck to people like McClung and Lester Pearson.

Success came to Beaverbrook in a way that it came to very few Canadians, but success for such a man was always a bitter fruit. “From the age of twelve on, he seems to have been so much on his own that it makes me sad when I think of it,” writes Richards. He was always the smartest man in the room when it came to money, but according to Richards he had an “almost pathological bent for trouble,” especially with his lifelong indulgence in pranks. If he were a boy today, Richards suggests, he “would have been put on medication.”

Richards, whose novels are, along with Atwood’s, the most powerful evocations of betrayal and isolation in our literature, cannot help casting this restless man as an outsider, vulnerable to treachery. “I came from that... backward province too,” Richards writes of New Brunswick. “I took in the same offices of adventure, and displeased the same kinds of people, and made my way in a world that was as often as closed toward me as his was toward him.” When Beaverbrook transferred his theatre of operations to Great Britain, he was “stabbed in the back” once again — this time not by fellow Canadians, but by “the crème de la crème of British society.” Richards casts his subject as a tragic figure, a self-destructive eccentric rather than a pioneer on the happy highway of progress.

The Canadian past is full of this kind of narrative, of cranks and gallant losers and people who took the wrong turn in history, as well as the narrative of admirable reformers and spiritually uplifting role models who maintain that “Christ was a true democrat.” Perhaps Penguin Canada should expand the series to include Disappointed Extraordinary Canadians — people like the nineteenth-century bishop Ignace Bourget, a commanding figure whose extreme fealty to the Pope and to a “priest-based Catholicism in Quebec” is clearly not regarded by Saul as one of the “building blocks of our society.” Similarly, the once world-renowned Canadian writer Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, the “father of Canadian literature,” still calls for attention despite his unrelentingly tragic animal stories, a “building block” the modern Canadian literati can do without. Nor should we forget the brilliant Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, head of the Hospital for the Insane in London, Ontario, and a fanatical devotee of the poet Walt Whitman — he hosted Whitman at his Ontario home for four months. Bucke coined the term “cosmic consciousness” and devoted his life to the insuperable task of converting Canadians to this mystical state of awareness.

If the series doesn’t allow for these different kinds of narratives in the future, if we do not see more portraits of people whose lives went against the grain, it will be a rather boring promenade of extraordinary Canadians.