It’s what we do as Canadians: forget our history just as fast as we accumulate it. Jack Granatstein and the Dominion Institute have been telling us that for a couple of years now. Maybe you believe them, maybe not, but when you look at the War of 1812 it’s not difficult to stir at least a little bit of sympathy. Laura Secord, Isaac Brock, Tecumseh, British soldiers barbecuing the White House – if a few stray images float across the collective consciousness, it remains for some reason a mostly forgotten war.

Pierre Berton did his best to resurrect the War of 1812 with his lusty two-volume account in the early 1980s. Fine historians like Donald Graves and Robert Malcolmson continue to illuminate underexposed corners of the conflict. This past spring, brothers Terence and Brian McKenna used actors and re-enactors to help tell the tale in the compelling four-hour documentary they produced for TVOntario. Victor Suthren’s The War of 1812 follows as a companion to that series.

No actors herein (although the book does include a CD-ROM, not reviewed here), just a lavishly illustrated general history. “We are engaged in an awful and eventful contest,” Brock, Britain’s civil and military commander in Upper Canada, told the Legislature in July of 1812. Drawing on mostly secondary sources, Suthren, who’s a novelist and former director of Ottawa’s Canadian War Museum, is an able narrator, fully outlining the contest even if he doesn’t go into Bertonian detail of its awfulness. While the book concentrates on matters military, Suthren does also, to his credit, manage to sketch in some social and political background.

And yet, with all respect to the writing, much of the praise due The War of 1812 goes to the illustrations. Along with all the blood and upheaval, the war inspired some dramatic works of art – indeed, through the painstaking devotion of painters like Peter Rindlisbacher, it continues to. The War of 1812 is an unprecedented gallery of paintings, prints, and maps. Whether or not it will be enough to return the battles depicted to the national memory – well, who knows?