Quill and Quire

REVIEWS

« Back to
Book Reviews

Donovan’s Station

by Robin McGrath

Writers of quality often come from the fringes, and places on the fringes can became centres of literary excellence. The Ireland of Yeats, Synge, and Joyce is one example, as is the American South of Faulkner and Eudora Welty. After reading Robin McGrath’s Donovan’s Station, I am beginning to wonder if Newfoundland is headed for similar glory.

The novel takes place in the summer of 1914, as 83-year-old Keziah Donovan lies paralyzed and mute following a stroke. Her thoughts run over her life, starting from the days when, at age five, she helped the future Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Anthony Fleming minister to a smallpox-ravaged outport. Three children, one unhappy marriage to a shoemaker, a happy one to a much younger man, coaxing cabbages and potatoes from the rocky soil, running a railroad hotel noted for its fine cooking: McGrath describes Keziah’s life with telling detail and convincing emotion.

This story is set off by two others: one told in notes from a journal kept by Keziah’s daughter during her mother’s final illness, the other by correspondence between a priest and his superiors that touches on what Keziah knows about Bishop Fleming. The Bishop is a real historical figure whose work for immigrants in the mid-1800s set the foundations for public education in Newfoundland. The journal entries tell about the gathering clouds of war, foreshadowing the horror Newfoundland troops would experience during the First World War. The letters and the notes place Keziah’s memories securely in time and give them resonance with the world outside of Newfoundland.

Donovan’s Station is not without flaws. At the end of the book McGrath pulls out a terrible secret about Keziah’s first marriage for which she hasn’t prepared us. But the book is another in several recent works from Newfoundland writers – Wayne Johnston and Dawn Rae Downton among them – that make up something more than a simple regional school of writers, creating work that goes far beyond the literature of local colour.

 

Reviewer: Mary Soderstrom

Publisher: Killick Press

DETAILS

Price: $15.95

Page Count: 200 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-894294-42-4

Released: May

Issue Date: 2002-7

Categories: Fiction: Novels