Canada, From Inside and Out : OH CANADA! OH QUEBEC! Requiem for a Divided Country, <i> By Mordecai Richler (Alfred A. Knopf: $23; 288 pp.)</i> : O CANADA: Travels in an Unknown County, <i> By Jan Morris (HarperCollins: $20; 208 pp.)</i>

There are more French Canadians alive now than ever before, and they possess more wealth and power than at any point in the past; yet their politics is based on the profoundly held belief that they are in danger of disappearing into the fog of history like some preliterate tribe of the Amazon. They see themselves, all 6.2 million of them, succumbing to the demographic pressure of North America and slowly assimilating into the English-speaking majority.

This fearful view of the future animates Quebec separatism, which has kept Canada in a state of more or less permanent crisis for a generation and has made constitution-writing the county’s major intellectual industry for as long as most young people can remember. The province of Quebec, where most French Canadians live, wants a new constitutional arrangement, one that will give much of the power now held by the Canadian government to the Quebec government, so that Quebec can do what is necessary to prevent French Canada from disappearing off the face of the earth.

The first rule of Canadian politics is that this issue must be treated with the utmost solemnity. No one, on any side, can laugh at it, for to do so is to prove oneself “insensitive,” a capital crime in Canada. Any law made in the name of French-Canadian survival, no matter how outlandish, becomes the subject of serious discussion. When the Quebec government in the 1970s forced stores and other businesses to tear down all signs in English, or French and English, and replace them with French-only signs, no political leader or journalist jeered. This bumpkinish chauvinism instead elicited widespread demands for “understanding” of French Canada’s plight. The law may have been grounded in spite and demagoguery, but Canada as a whole (including the English speakers in Quebec) was expected to see the cultural necessity of giving a “French face” to Quebec and particularly to the city of Montreal. Most Canadians, including most of those who profess to be civil-libertarians, acquiesced. Canadians will do almost anything to preserve the peace.

Comes now Mordecai Richler, the celebrated author of “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and many other books. In his essays as in his novels, Richler has always been a gadfly, and in particular an annoyance to his fellow Canadian Jews. A few years ago he turned his attention to Quebec nationalism, in which he perceived an “unquenchable thirst for self-pity” and a nasty strain of authoritarianism. Last September the New Yorker published his lengthy treatment of this subject, and immediately it became the most famous and infamous magazine article in--so far as anyone can tell--the entire history of Canada.

In Quebec, Richler was reviled from every editorial pulpit for making fun of the language laws and for recalling, in embarrassing detail, the extent to which several of modern Quebec’s leading intellectuals (now all dead, fortunately) were dedicated antisemites. Elsewhere in Canada, Richler was frequently described as a talented writer who had somehow betrayed the country by producing so much anger in the midst (Canada is always in the midst) of delicate constitutional bargaining. His article was not (another serious crime in Canada) “helpful.”

“Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!,” a much extended and much rewritten version of the New Yorker piece, has turned out to be an even graver offense. A Quebec separatist member of the federal parliament demanded that the book be banned, and the author prosecuted, under the law against hate literature.

As they had last September, the editorialists of Quebec rose up as one and smote Richler. He may have been harder to attack this time, since his evidence of the antisemitic stain on Quebec nationalism was now more extensive, but they attacked anyway. Some Quebec journalists even demanded that English-speaking Canada should take pains to disassociate itself from Richler’s hateful views. Incredibly, a few writers and journalists did just that.

At this point it would be the greatest pleasure for a Richler-admiring Toronto Anglophone like the present reviewer, long impatient with the pretension of Quebec nationalism, to announce that “Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!” is a work of brilliant clarity, incisive and witty. Alas, it is none of those things. It turns out to be disorganized and rambling, frequently clotted with undigested material, an obstacle course for anyone who finds the topic strange and not much of a treat even for those who have been through this story before. Unfamiliar names rush past in a blur, laws and regulations become hopelessly mixed in the reader’s mind. Often we are taken to meetings in pubs where nothing of much interest is said.

In short, substandard Richler--a big surprise. Since he was born in Montreal, and has watched French-Canadian nationalism for half a century, he would seem to be the perfect author of such a book. That he’s failed to produce a readable and compelling piece of work may be due simply to the level of his feelings. Rage has a way of making even talented writers incomprehensible.

Jan Morris has given her new book of essays a similar title, “O Canada: Travels in an Unknown Country,” but she otherwise resembles Richler in only one way: Both of them affect to be astonished when the subjects of their writing are offended. Just as Richler claimed to be surprised by the outrage he produced among French-Canadians, so Morris tells us in an introductory note that she can’t imagine why her essay on the city of Vancouver was not universally popular with Vancouverites when it first appeared in 1988.

After all, she said nothing worse than that Vancouver was the last resort of pleasantness “of a middle-class, middle-income, middle-aged Englishy kind.” She said merely that the people there tend to be shy and inhibited and are apparently yearning for self-release, that their architecture lacks spontaneity, and that the city’s tone is not exactly nice but rather “variously neo-nice, semi-nice, post-nice, over-nice . . . “ What could possibly be offensive about that?

The locals, of course, knew when they were being patronized, and reacted with fury at Morris and the Canadian magazine in which the Vancouver piece, and most of the other city profiles she’s assembled in this book, were first published. Undeterred, she moved on to the next city on her list, taking her sense of innocence with her. Innocence is one of her charms, and certainly charm--as opposed to piercing insight or narrative strength--is the most obvious quality of her work in recent years.

Jan Morris may be the most experienced travel writer in the world. After all, she’s not only covered most of the major cities of the planet, she’s also made--alone among travel writers, I believe--the longest voyage available to humans on earth, the surgically assisted journey from male James to female Jan. To suggest that her life experience is varied is to wildly understate the case.

It’s therefore worth noting that the easternmost city on this continent, St. John’s, Newfoundland, is her all-time favorite. Why? Aside from being a provincial capital, St. John’s is a chronically impoverished old fishing port of fewer than 100,000 people (165,000 in the greater metropolitan area) with few of the museums, theaters and other cultural pleasures of great cities. What Morris responds to, and describes with great acuity, is the genuineness of the place.

St. John’s people speak in their own way (the accent musically combines Irish and West Country English) about their own subjects. They are curious about outsiders, and tolerant, but it is their own affairs that matter to them, and they seem not to care whether they impress the world. In a time when most cities are anxious to turn themselves into stage sets, St. John’s is never (apparently) giving a performance. It still seems, Morris reports with some surprise, “more or less real”--and if that richly pungent civic character is even faintly fraudulent, the fraud is skillfully concealed.

In travel writing, what matters most is not what the writer finds but what she brings with her. Jan Morris, a Welsh nationalist of radical anarchist views, nevertheless admits to feelings that are nostalgic, even reactionary. That makes her the perfect student of Canada, a country that clings ferociously--as Richler demonstrates--to tradition even while relentlessly tearing itself to pieces.