Some novels demand your attention with noise, spectacle, trauma, transformation. David Roy Montgomerie Johnson’s Somebody Else’s War does the opposite. It drifts in like a memory you weren’t trying to recall: familiar, unresolved, and somehow more real than whatever came after. The story is set in 1968, a year crackling with historical flashpoints, but Johnson is less interested in fire than in the smoke that lingers after it. His gaze stays fixed on a small, fictional Canadian town, where news of the Tet Offensive and MLK’s assassination arrives like static on a faraway signal. Newport on the Lake isn’t where history happens. It’s where people live while it does.

But this book isn’t really about 1968. It’s about what happens when a place, and the people in it, lose track of what they used to be. It’s about the quiet dismantling of myths: of honour, of war, of manhood, of national purpose. It’s about the lies we inherit and what we do with them once we recognize the seams.

A Town Suspended in Time

Newport on the Lake might not be real, but it feels eerily familiar. The kind of place where nothing ever really changes, and the things that do do so with glacial indifference. The courthouse still stands like a relic of the Empire. The clock tower, the novel’s running gag and quiet metaphor, doesn’t keep time, it gets hit by trucks. The police department is more a formality than a force. And the local mayor, Windy (yes, that’s really his name), postures and sputters like a man trying to remember what authority is supposed to feel like.

Johnson has crafted a town that resembles a body past its prime, one still functioning out of habit, refusing to believe it’s broken because it hasn’t quite stopped moving. It’s a portrait of a place not in crisis but in drift. And that drift is what the book captures so well. Not collapse. Not chaos. Just slow, persistent erosion.

There’s a weight to that kind of stillness. An accumulation of stories that no one tells out loud. And it’s in this psychic terrain that Somebody Else’s War locates its power, not in what happens, but in what has already happened and gone unspoken.

Deconstructing the Myth of the Soldier

At the novel’s emotional core is Captain Sammy Enfield, a former U.S. Marine and current Canadian cop who spends most of his time dealing with petty crime, persistent nightmares, and the unshakable feeling that something important slipped through his fingers years ago. Sammy is not the kind of war veteran fiction tends to canonize. He’s not haunted in a showy way. He’s not wise or violent or drunk with memories. He’s just... frayed.

The scar on his face is visible, sure. But the deeper ones, the ones in his sense of self, in his relationship with his estranged wife, in the distance he feels from his own son, are harder to name. And Johnson never tries to. He trusts the reader to notice the absences.

This refusal to sentimentalize or dramatize the soldier figure is one of the book’s most subversive moves. Sammy isn’t a symbol. He’s not even especially competent. But he’s trying. And in that effort, in that quiet commitment to getting out of bed and doing his job and feeding the cat, he becomes something more honest than any caricature of heroism: a man who was promised meaning through service and now lives with the quiet terror that there might not be any.

Masculinity Without Center

It’s hard to overstate how deftly this novel navigates the subject of masculinity. There’s no lecture. No explicit interrogation. Just a series of portraits, drawn in prose that’s both sharp and forgiving, of men who don’t know what they are anymore.

There’s Tubby, a cop past his prime and possibly past his usefulness. He smokes too much, can’t finish his sentences, and serves mostly as a stand-in for authority that no longer inspires fear or respect.

There’s Gunner Simpson, a quiet, dignified man with a mysterious past in intelligence work, now raising his children with patience and surprising emotional fluency. He walks his son through Franklin’s virtues like they’re gospel, but never with arrogance. His strength lies in how little he demands to be seen as strong.

There’s also the grotesque contrast in B11711, the prisoner whose bitterness and cruelty feel like the logical endpoint of unresolved entitlement. He is, perhaps, what happens when masculinity is left to fester.

And then there’s Boy, Gunner’s son, who represents a possible way out. He listens. He learns. He questions things without the weight of needing to appear certain. In a novel full of men stuck in their own legacies, Boy feels like a window cracked open.

Where the Women Speak the Truth

In a book largely populated by men who cannot or will not say what they mean, the women often carry the novel’s emotional clarity. Becky, Sammy’s ex-wife, offers perhaps the most heartbreaking insight in the book as she traces the generational curse of the Enfield men, soldiers all dead before they could raise their sons. Her grief is not loud. But it is articulate, specific, and quietly devastating.

Chrissy, a waitress at the local diner, doesn’t get as much page time, but she’s unforgettable. Her facial scar, a literal wound in a book full of figurative ones, isn’t explained away or romanticized. She lives with it. Her brief, surprisingly tender interaction with Sammy becomes one of the few moments in the novel where real connection cuts through the fog.

Absence as Setting

For all its texture, Somebody Else’s War is a novel of absences. Missing fathers. Missing futures. Missing opportunities to be better people. But these absences don’t sit like holes in the text. They are the text. The book asks you to sit in them. To notice what’s not being said. To feel how the characters circle around what they can’t quite admit, to themselves or anyone else.

There’s no redemption arc here. No climactic reckoning. There’s a walk in the snow. A conversation that almost says what needs to be said. A father who stays up just a bit too late, listening to the quiet. That restraint, artistically and emotionally, is one of Johnson’s most impressive achievements.

Stillness as Resistance

What lingers after the final page is not a resolution but a kind of emotional reverberation. A sense that while the world outside may continue its chaos, its wars, its headlines, its revolutions, there is something quietly radical about just enduring about keeping a diner open. About walking your dog. About raising your son differently than you were raised.

In this way, Somebody Else’s War becomes not just a portrait of a place or a year but a meditation on how people survive when the mythologies around them begin to crumble.

We live in a time that still valorizes motion, success measured in transformation, in speed, in “moving on.” Johnson suggests something else. That staying can be just as profound. That watching, remembering, questioning, these, too, are forms of living. And maybe even forms of protest.

Because sometimes, the war that matters isn’t the one with guns and uniforms. It’s the quiet one. The one fought inside a diner in the middle of a Canadian winter between people who have no idea how much they’re carrying.

And sometimes, the ones who don’t march, don’t fight, don’t shout, those are the ones who teach us how to bear the weight.