Down the Long Table

A novel as realistic as it is satiric, Earle Birney’s Down the Long Table presents an enduring procession of political and human characters from two separate eras of social and political upheaval. The hero is Gordon Saunders, a Canadian professor at a U.S. college during the McCarthy years, who is found to have a past in Depression-era Canada that was peopled with Stalinists, Trotskyites, socialists, agitators and malcontents of every cast and hue, from casual pink to radical Red. As a Congressional investigative storm ranges around him, he reflects on his rose-tinted past. In the midst of social satire and social comment, Earle Birney has created a truly original fictional character – a classic humanitarian innocent, abroad in a brutal political world where everyone’s playing for keeps.