The Smiling Land: All Around the Circle in My Newfoundland and Labrador by Alan Doyle
Reviewed by Robin McGrath
As tourist destinations go, Newfoundland will never rival Hawaii or New York, but it is gradually attracting more visitors, as becomes evident if you try to book a hotel room or a rental car there from June to September. Travel books about the province are not new. As early as 1931, Joe Smallwood produced a very respectable book about the place, aimed at the 150,000 Newfoundlanders and their descendants who resided in the United States and Canada. In more recent times, Jan Morris wrote about St. John's, which she called the “most entertaining town in North America,” known for its unique character, friendly people, and dramatic harbour. John Gilette produced Theatre of Fish, about which the less said the better, and in 2007, Robert Finch published The Iambics of Newfoundland, the best of any guides written so far.
“The book is framed as an account of a car trip he made around the province, accompanied by his wife and son.”
Although Alan Doyle is best known as a pop singer and actor, he has also served in various capacities as a tour guide, and has turned his hand to writing books, the fourth of which is The Smiling Land, a tourist guide for the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. The book is framed as an account of a car trip he made around the province, accompanied by his wife and son. His wife does the driving, the son critiques his father's knowledge of the places they visit, and Doyle tries to capture his own reaction to the communities they go to, by writing notes, sketching description, and dictating into his phone.
The text shifts from present tense to past impressions he had of these places, and this is a little confusing at first, but it does evoke a sense of immediacy. Doyle employs the presence of his son, Henry, to pose the questions a tourist might have, which allows him to explain why Newfoundlanders go “down to Labrador” and “up to the Southern Shore.”
Not all of Doyle's descriptions of various places of interest in the province are particularly insightful. When discussing the community of St. Anthony, he gives us a two-paragraph summary of Sir Wilfred Grenfell's account of his forty hours spent adrift on a disintegrating ice pan in Hare Bay while on an emergency call. Doyle's account, like Grenfell's, reads like an act of heroic self-sacrifice, and Doyle simply accepts Grenfell's own claim that he came away from the ordeal without a feather out of him.1
When Doyle visits the airstrip at Harbour Grace, he is wonderstruck at his failure to recall Amelia Earhart's famous solo flight across the Atlantic. He describes Earhart as “one of the most famous people in the history of flying and exploration and human achievement.” A recent article in The New Yorker (June 9, 2025) by Laurie Gwen Shapiro, makes a convincing argument that Earhart was a reckless pilot, more preoccupied with giving lectures and making sponsorship appearances than in honing her flying skills.
While visiting and admiring the Basilica of St. John the Baptist in St. John's, Doyle recalls Ron Hynes's funeral in 1991 as “one of the only multi-denominational services ever held there.” Two earlier ones come immediately to mind, that of Joe Smallwood in 1991, and that of the victims of the Ocean Ranger tragedy in 1992. However, there were almost certainly others. Doyle depicts Hynes as a great songwriter, which he was, and as a secular saint, which he certainly wasn't.
He writes that Mallard Cottage, now a restaurant in Quidi Vidi Village on the fringes of St. John's, is said to date back as far as 1820, and “could be the oldest wooden structure in the province.” This is unlikely. Construction of the inglenook fireplace in the White House in Portugal Cove was begun in 1800, and there are probably other houses that predate both the White House and Mallard Cottage.
Do these probable errors matter? Not really, as this is a travel guide for tourists, not an exploration of history. What may be of more importance and interest to Doyle's fans is his use of code-switching, the practice of alternating between different languages or dialects. Much is made by outsiders of Newfoundlanders' tendency to switch from standard English to one of the seven dialects spoken on the island as soon as they encounter a friend, relative, or any fellow Newfoundlander. Doyle has a university degree and knows that “I hates driving,” or “I finds it hard,” is not standard English, but he also knows that such language is a sign of intimacy when addressing someone he wishes to bond with.
He never calls a man a man, he's always a “fella,” like himself, and he sprinkles his comments with words such as “Jasus,” “frig” and “shag”, although he also coyly writes the “F” word as F--K. Perhaps he believes frig and shag are not going to be understood by outsiders, when, in various parts of the English-speaking world, “frig” means fuck, as does “shag” except when Newfoundlanders happen to be referring to cormorants. In discussing dialect, his explanation of the common local practice of turning a th into a hard t could have been given more attention than the anecdote he provides.
“The casual, joking style that has made Doyle such a popular entertainer is evident in this text, but doesn’t work quite as well on the page as it does on the stage.”
The casual, joking style that has made Doyle such a popular entertainer is evident in this text, but doesn't work quite as well on the page as it does on the stage. He is overly fond of beginning sentences with coordinating conjunctions, regularly splits infinitives, and has a very lamentable habit of employing an enormous number of sentence fragments for no apparent reason. The semicolon is frequently overused by writers, but Doyle could have used a few. When these bad habits are employed verbally, it's easy to ignore them, but reading dialogue and hearing it are two very different experiences.
The sections that Doyle fans will enjoy are those which are personal anecdotes, including his search for an iceberg shaped like a penis, eating his way through the bottom of a cardboard box of fish and chips with gravy, and having a picnic with his son Henry at the Ferryland lighthouse. He employs self-mockery throughout, mostly by having Q & A exchanges with Henry, who corrects him or challenges his expertise. Doyle usually comes off as the loser. The humour in these exchanges is a bit lame, though. Henry sounds more like a saucy 12-year-old than an eighteen-year-old young adult.
A tourism guide should, by its nature, be enthusiastic about its subjects, and The Smiling Land is certainly that, but too often Doyle's punchline for each site is the same: “God, I love this place,” or “Go there. Thank me later.” From the first, Doyle makes it clear that he thinks the Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Tourism ads depicting sunny skies and clean linen on clothes lines will give visitors an unrealistic picture of the province's challenging weather, but he does much the same thing himself.
It's natural that a “fella” who loves his home will want to picture it in a good light, but you can't put only your best foot forward--two feet are usually required for any journey. This book reflects some of the reasons Alan Doyle is held in such high regard by Newfoundlanders and audiences around the world, but a good editor could have extended this regard and affection to include his readers also.
About the Author
Alan Doyle is a Canadian musician, actor and writer. His albums as a solo artist and as frontman for the Newfoundland Celtic-rock band Great Big Sea have sold over a million copies. He has starred in such features as Ridley Scott's Robin Hood and CBC's Republic of Doyle. He has written three books, Where I Belong, published in 2014, A Newfoundlander in Canada, published in 2017, and All Together Now, published in 2020, each of which were national bestsellers. He has recently co-written and starred in a box-office-breaking stage musical, Tell Tale Harbour. Alan lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.
About the Reviewer
Robin McGrath was born in Newfoundland. She earned a doctorate from the University of Western Ontario, taught at the University of Alberta, and for 25 years did research in the Canadian Arctic on Inuit Literature and culture before returning home to Newfoundland and Labrador. She now lives in Harbour Main and is a full-time writer. Robin has published 26 books and over 700 articles, reviews, introductions, prefaces, teaching aids, essays, conference proceedings and chapbooks. Her most recent book is Labrador, A Reader’s Guide. (2023). She is a columnist for the Northeast Avalon Times and does freelance editing.
Book Details
Publisher : Doubleday Canada
Publication date : Nov. 4 2025
Language : English
Print length : 264 pages
ISBN-10 : 0385694415
ISBN-13 : 978-0385694414
In fact, Ron Rompkey’s biography of the doctor claims Grenfell displayed poor judgement when he decided to continue the trip alone after his travelling companions were unable to meet him. Moreover, Grenfell didn’t come through the ordeal as casually as he claimed. He suffered seriously from exposure and frostbite, appeared to be hallucinating in the days following his rescue, and suffered from mental depression for some time. The real heroes of that episode were the five men who put themselves in considerable danger to get through miles of rotten ice and bad weather, the only thanks or acknowledgement they got being an engraved watch and an autographed photo of Grenfell.