BOOK REVIEW / Tongue-troopers bitten: 'Oh Canada] Oh Quebec]' - Mordecai Richler: Chatto & Windus, 13.99 pounds

THE Nineties have proved to be dire years for that once vaunted system of government, federalism. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia . . . even in the European Community, federalism has become the F-word.

Little attention, however, has been paid to the apparent unravelling across the Atlantic of a showcase federation eagerly nurtured - like other such amalgams in the erstwhile British Empire - by Mr Major's Downing Street forbears. 'A federal union under the Crown of Great Britain' was how modern Canada was conceived in the mid-nineteenth Century. So it remains today. But the union now seems perilously close to breakup.

Canada remains largely ignored over here, as befits the perceived Switzerland of North America. Although prophecies of national doom are a regular feature of Canada's ongoing 'civil bore', the predicted catastrophe never quite seems to materialise, and international interest flags. It is left to someone like Mordecai Richler, with his eye for the bizarre, to point up the zaniness at large in the supposedly dull Dominion.

Take, for instance, the great 'candy crisis'. A government food inspector ruled that jelly babies and fruit pastilles made by Rowntrees of England had to be removed from a shop in Toronto because their names and ingredients were not listed in both the official languages. 'Other provocative British imports pronounced guilty of the same offence,' Richler reports, 'included Cadbury's Dairy Milk, Fruit & Nut, Nestle's Milk Bar, and Fry's Peppermint Cream.'

Then there's the firebrand leader of the main separatist party in predominantly French Quebec, Jacques Parizeau, who, Richler notes, also happens to be a dedicated Anglophile. 'He is a graduate of the London School of Economics and an admirer of Queen Elizabeth.' A fierce opponent of equal linguistic status for English with French in the Quebec metropolis of Montreal, Parizeau nevertheless seems to have sprung from a P G Wodehouse novel, his English liberally sprinkled with exclamations of 'by Jove' and 'jolly good'.

Richler quotes tellingly from the crazy-quilt regulations aimed at giving the French language superiority over English in any bilingual signs displayed by Quebec shops: 'French letters (sic) must be bigger than English letters. The space around the French letters must be larger than the space around the English letters. The French message must be placed to the left of the English one, or on top.' The language laws are policed by vigilantes known to the disgruntled Anglophone minority as 'tongue-troopers'.

These are roads that lead to independence. Richler's conclusion, though, is that the French in 'la belle province' will probably draw back from the brink, as so often before, and settle for a radically reformed union, 'a loot bag that would yield still more sweets for the Quebec Cookie Monster'.

Internationally celebrated as the spirited chronicler of working- class Jewish life in Montreal, Richler is characteristically irreverent towards the anomalies of the Quebec and Canadian scene, and his book has been assailed by outraged protagonists of the French establishment in his native city. His irreverence (one august father of Quebec nationalism is exposed as anti-Semitic and branded a 'vile little cleric') is refreshing. But too many of his aspersions seem glib. He does not speak French, and his book lacks the sense of first-hand familiarity with the literature of French Canada found in Edmund Wilson's ground-breaking 1965 study of matters Canadian.

Richler's style suffers from a forced breeziness, rather like someone aping the inimitable H L Mencken. Devoid of an index or any structure other than a vaguely chronological form, Oh Canada] Oh Quebec] will also baffle many non-Canadians with its deluge of local minutiae. Yet the book might counter Britain's obliviousness to a senior Commonwealth country, unblessed by the flamboyance and cricket-mania which guarantee a soft spot here for that other outpost of British-induced federalism, Australia.