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The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

There was a novel published a few years ago called Under the Skin. Written by Michel Faber, it has perhaps the most original premise of any piece of fiction in the last five, six, maybe 10 years. I won’t spoil the premise. I only mention it here because it was the first good example to spring to mind after reading The Island Walkers, the debut novel by Maclean’s writer John Bemrose.

The Island Walkers has perhaps the most shockingly unoriginal premise to come along in the last five, six, maybe 10 minutes. Or, at least, since the last time a Canadian novel was published that dealt with small towns and factories and unions and family sagas played out in a series of minor gains and tender losses; a novel populated by increasingly bitter yet well-meaning wives and sons drifting apart from their fathers, and rivers freezing over and the first blossoms of adolescent love.

Even if he has chosen the overused path of Canadian small-town drama, Bemrose struggles from the outset. Not with words – some sentences are perfect combinations of form and sentiment. Bemrose struggles in the best possible way, taking the mediocrity of the scenario and working it into something far more satisfying than it has any right to be. Like any good novel – Faber’s included – The Island Walkers’ first 100 pages are full of effortless detail. Bemrose takes the clichéd and makes it fresh. He takes the CBC and turns it into HBO.

Early in the story the Walker clan sits down for a meal and by the time they’ve finished, the inner machinations of the family have been illustrated in dashes of natural detail. When Alf, the father, speaks he seems to “rise out of silence as a fish might rise from the water, its natural element, soon returning to it again.” His wife, Margaret, is a war bride, a term that used to make their eldest son Joe think of her “striding off to battle in skirts and helmet.” This picture isn’t far off – she still maintains an emotional rigidity exported from England.

The Walkers are known as the Island Walkers not because of some supernatural striding power, but because they live in a small working class neighbourhood separated by a sluggish canal, a place where the families “considered themselves quite separate from the town’s other residents.” Bemrose ensures that they’re not just unlike other townspeople – they’re unlike most thinly drawn fictional families.

Joe is at the end of his high school career. He’s helplessly in love with a young poet in his class whose worldliness and beckoning university life in France are in direct opposition to his own thinning prospects. His father, who works at the knitting factory at the centre of the town, is facing his own hard choices, stuck between the promise of a job offered by the management and another chance at forming a union and staying true to the co-workers.

The plot does not shine on the page, nor does it move in an artificial hurry. Bemrose finds magic in the details. To be won over by a novel, to have expectations flipped by the inventiveness of good writing – what could be better than that?

The problem is sustaining the act. To use my example again, Michel Faber’s fantastic scenario propels his own book right through to its end. The novelty of the idea animates the sections that would have otherwise lagged. Because Bemrose has started with such a familiar scenario, he has to put in more work to make it new.

It’s hard to be so brilliantly exact with language, to stretch out the confines of Canadian small-town realism in unexpected and meaningful ways, and to do it for 500 pages. The last quarter of the novel feels drawn out even though the scenes get shorter. One character “seems more distant,” another “sounds an awful lot like some movie cowboy.” There are spots of melodramatic domestic violence and overblown dialogue. Bemrose’s mastery slips.

Thankfully The Island Walkers never becomes the soap opera it easily could have, but in its final stages the prose is not as delightful to read. The characters lose some of the tender exactitude the author afforded them at the beginning. It’s a frustrating and unfulfilling end, especially after such an expectation-defying beginning.

 

Reviewer: Craig Taylor

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $34.99

Page Count: 520 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-7710-1111-3

Issue Date: 2003-7

Categories: Fiction: Novels