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Overview
A powerful first novel about a family that slips from fortune's favor and a town broken by the forces of modernity
Across a bend of Ontario's Attawan River lies the Island, a working-class neighborhood of whitewashed houses and vine-freighted fences, black willows and decaying sheds. Here, for generations, the Walkers have lived among the other mill workers.
The family's troubles begin in the summer of 1965, when a union organizer comes to town and Alf Walker is forced to choose between loyalty to his friends at the mill and advancement up the company ranks. Alf's worries are aggravated by his wife, Margaret, who has never reconciled her middle-class English upbringing to her blue-collar reality. As the summer passes, Joe, their son, is also forced to reckon with his family's standing when he falls headlong for a beautiful newcomer on a bridge—a girl far beyond him, with greater experience and broader horizons. As the threat of mill closures looms, the Walkers grapple with their personal crises, just as the rest of the town fights to protect its way of life amid the risks of unionization and the harsh demands of corporate power.
Superbly crafted and deeply moving, this remarkable debut follows the Walkers to the very bottom of their night only to confirm, in the end, life's ultimate hopefulness. The Island Walkers is at once a love letter to a place, a gripping family saga, and a testimony to the emergence of an important new novelist.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466857650 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/19/2013 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 603 KB |
About the Author
John Bemrose is a contributing editor at Maclean's magazine, where he writes features, profiles, and criticism. A native of Paris, Ontario, he lives in Toronto; The Island Walkers is his first novel.
John Bemrose is a contributing editor at Maclean’s magazine, where he writes features, profiles, and criticism. A native of Paris, Ontario, he lives in Toronto; The Island Walkers is his first novel.
Read an Excerpt
One Saturday in the summer of 1965, Joe and Alf Walker climbed onto the roof and spent the better part of the morning stripping the old shingles. By eleven they were busy nailing down the new ones. Joe, who had turned eighteen that July, worked on the slope overlooking the backyard. He sat shirtless, on his duff, and hammered sullenly between his legs, aware of the sun-baked expanse of tarpaper stretching up the slope behind him. From beyond the peak, his father's hammer thundered without rest. It seemed crazy to try to keep up.
He shifted his weight, placed the next shingle, and looked across the yard with its picnic table and apple tree, its narrow lawn and rows of vegetables -- beyond the flooddyke blooming cheerfully with his mother's flowers, to the Atta, flowing through the shadow of Lookout Hill. Under its far bank -- a dim cave of limestone and darkly rippling water -- it looked cool and inviting: another world. He was labouring under protest, under a sense of injustice that drove him on in angry spurts then dragged him into a sloth so deep it was like a spell. Why were they doing this today? Today -- as he'd mentioned to his father last Wednesday, he was sure -- he and Smiley were planning to go hunting with Smiley's new .22. His friend had gone on without him. A few minutes ago he'd heard a shot echo down the valley.
He dipped into the bag beside him and the sharp nails bit his fingers. For weeks the shingles had sat beside the house in their paper wrappings, under a paintspotted tarp. A dozen times at least his mother had said, "Alf, I am getting so tired of that heap out there. You'd think we were living in the Ozarks." His mother's idea ofthe Ozarks came from television, but she used the phrase to convey a sense of social embarrassment, of appearances that were not up to the mark. He always thought it sounded funny in her English accent. His mother was a war bride. Hearing the words as a young boy, he had imagined her striding off to battle in skirts and helmet. The vision had made him slightly wary of her, as if she could lay claim to secret, irresistible powers. Yet there had been nothing but weary exasperation in her complaints about the roof, the mechanical recitation of an old war cry that no longer frightened anybody: an act for tourists. She had grown up in a finer house than this: she'd told him many times about the books, the grand piano, the holidays in Normandy. "Your father's uniform fooled me completely" -- this was another of her stories -- "For all I knew he was a millionaire's son." It had become a family joke, told at the right time at parties: her coming down in the world was a mistake, based on her inability to read his father's status by his accent or his clothes. It was not until after she'd arrived in Attawan in the spring of 1946 that she realized what she'd done. She hadn't given up, though: getting the roof shingled was only one in an endless series of assaults on their rough edges -- on their house that, by her standards, was too small and, despite their relentless improvements, still too shabby, not to mention situated in the wrong part of town. Joe looked back to the river. Such thoughts were troubling, leading to shadows, sadness. Better to hunker down like his father and pretend he wasn't affected.
Yet his father wasn't impervious. His wife's complaints might seem to sink into him without a trace, snow into dark water, but they could achieve a critical mass. This morning he had roused Joe early and announced that today they were shingling the roof. But why today, Joe wondered, the hottest so far of the whole summer? At breakfast, over a trembling forkful of fried egg, he dared to question the decision -- maybe they should wait till it was cooler, he said, thinking the whole time of Smiley's gun, of the wafer of silver light at the end of the scope and even of the word "scope" itself, so pleasing and final, like a bullet smacking into mud. "It's gonna rain," his father said, and when Joe said, "It's rained before," meaning and you never bothered then, his father had said quietly, looking at him with those iceblue eyes the colour of Lake Erie in spring, "No arguments."
He thought there was something fanatical in his father that came from a place of silence and brooding Joe couldn't read: something extreme and overbearing and violent that thank God was not there all the time but that could leap up like a blade you hadn't been careful with and nip you. Now it was his arbitrariness that bothered him most. What gave him the right to decide? Why did he have to obey? Why didn't he just throw down his hammer and leave the roof? He suspected that if he did, he would have to leave the house as well. He had absorbed some old notion that work was something you did for everybody, without complaint. He had worked for as long as he could remember, washing floors, washing the car, digging gardens, stacking cans at the A&P; this summer he was at Bannerman's. He expected to work, but this morning some remnant of an ancient grievance had surfaced: the need for unquestioning obedience was an injustice and so was the loss of his day. He felt, irrationally, as if his entire future had been torn from him.
The hammering from the other side had stopped. A moment later he heard his father's heavy, braced steps come down the slope behind him. The pack of shingles slammed into the roofboards like a body.
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
"A town of two rivers, its plunging valley an anomaly in the tedious southwestern Ontario plain…The traveler, coming across this place, might be forgiven for imagining that life is better here." During the mid-1960s, Attawan braces itself for changes that will destroy the life of this small textile mill town. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the 2003 Giller Prize, The Island Walkers is the poetically crafted story about a time of crisis that befalls the Walker Family. The tragic hero, Alf, must make a decision to either spy on his co-workers for his own advancement or be loyal to the people to whom he has generational ties. Meanwhile his son, Joe, slowly discovers himself after falling in love with the worldly Anna Macrimmon. The Island Walkers chronicles a family who is faced with decisions that will ultimately define who they are.
1. "For several generations, the people of the island- mostly mill workers and their families- had considered themselves quite separate from the town's other residents." How does the symbolic meaning of an island pertain to the Island residents? How do the residents of the Island compare to the residents of the Flats or the North End?
2. How do you view the Walkers? Are they a hard working family trying to make a better life for themselves or have their lives "gone up in war, in anger, in hope, in the churn of the knitting machines?" How is every member of the family faced with difficult decisions? Are they better people as a result of the decisions they have made?
3. At the start of the novel, Alf is anti-union despite the argument from Pete that "a union can do things…they wouldn't be able to treat people like they do." Discuss why the workers at Bannerman's are anti-union. What would the merits of a union bring to the workers of Bannerman's? Is Alf disingenuous to change his position about unions after he is fired?
4. When the McVey sisters and Anna go to Turtle Rock for a swim they are jeered because of their wealth and promptly leave. What is the significance of status in the novel? Is Anna's mother correct when she said the people of Attawan are "crude…It's all about hurry and money and a lack of pleasure in things"? Discuss the status of the Walker family. How does Margaret feel about her family's lot in life?
5. Margaret tells Joe that "before he'd gone off to France his father had been a different man- a cheerful, outgoing person." How has the war affected Alf? What parts of his past influence the decisions he makes for the future? (i.e. the war, the strike of '49, the death of his brother, and his failed business.)
6. In negotiations for the foreman's job, Bob Prince tells Alf, "Business is war…it takes a certain bloodymindedness. You can't worry about people too much." Does Alf have the constitution for the business world? Discuss the choice he was given by Prince in order to advance in the company. Was he given a fair chance at the job? Is he destined to fail?
7. Although Alf is "resentful that he had to do anything, let alone distasteful, for the foreman's job" he gives up the name of one worker. Why does Alf give up only one name? Is he a "stooge" for giving up Woody Marr? Since the layoff was one cause of Pete's suicide, should Alf feel the guilt he does for his death?
8. Why does Alf carry on an affair with Lucille Boileau? What does the affair say about his character? How is Alf's relationship with Lucille similar to the one Joe has with Liz McVey? What is the attraction between the two couples? What do they all learn from each other?
9. While bartending at the McVey's New Year's Eve party, Joe argues with Bob Prince over the virtues of socialism. Why does Joe engage this argument? Who do you consider wins the argument? How does the debate characterize Joe and his upbringing?
10. During a debate over poetry, Professor Mann tells Anna that poetry is "the beauty of life that passes us by with hardly a glance." What does he mean by this statement? Discuss the influence of poetry in the novel. How does Anna express herself through poetry? What have poetry and Anna taught Joe?
11. At a meeting about the close of the factory, Alf states, "A lot of our grandmothers and grandfathers worked for Bannerman's, we feel like it's ours- hell, I think it is ours. Why didn't you even ask us what we think should be done here?" Discuss whether you agree with Alf. Does Bannerman's have an obligation to its workers if the factory becomes obsolete? Should the workers feel as if they have been left in the "lurch"? Does this justify the burning down of the mill?
12. After the mill burns down, police "were trying to piece together Alf's whereabouts on the night of the fire. Apparently someone claimed to have sighted the Biscayne near the mills an hour or so before the alarm had been turned in." Discuss whether or not Alf had a role in the burning down of the mill. Is Joe correct to think, "he was trying to help someone?" What should be Alf's legacy?
13. At the conclusion of the novel, " a weakness infected" Joe's body and his remedy is "the desire to go on, however weak or unhappy or afraid he still was." How will the town of Attawan and the Walker family go on? How did it become a town where "the traveler, coming across this place, might be forgiven for imagining that life is better here?"
Interviews
McClelland & Stewart: Where did this novel come from?
John Bemrose: The Island Walkers is my first novel, and I wrote it late in life: I was forty-nine when I started it, and it took almost six years to finish. So I suppose you could say I've put my whole life into it, not in a literal sense, but in the sense of whatever vision of things I'd built up over five decades.
The novel also comes out of my childhood and youth in the town of Paris, Ontario. My parents, who also grew up there, filled my head with stories about the place. So the hills and rivers of Paris, you might say, became saturated with narrative. This was both wonderful – it brought the town alive in a deep way – and oppressive, for I increasingly felt I had to do something with it all. In a very real way, the town made me a writer.
M&S: Yes, there's a strong sense of the town, Attawan, in the novel.
JB: I didn't want Attawan – which is very closely modeled on Paris – to be just a pretty background. I wanted something more atmospheric, penetrating. I wanted, constantly, the look and smell of things – was the air damp, was it smokey? Incidental characters are part of this: often people will make only a brief appearance in the book, but you'll get their name, perhaps a bit of their history. It's part of the deep contextual knowledge that can make living in a small town both comforting and claustrophobic.
In other words, I was trying to evoke a sense of place. The sense of place is one of the prime instruments of our relationship to the earth. It is how we know the earth. Just as we know the human race primarilythrough our own friends and families, so we know the earth through specific locales. Unfortunately, the sense of place, which we used to take for granted in people, is rapidly being eroded by our way of life - by speed, by our increasingly monotonic culture. The question we have to ask is “how serious we can be about saving the planet if we no longer know what the planet is in any intimate, local sense”?
M&S: How did your sense of place inform the writing of the book?
JB: I often found that when I couldn't make a scene work, it was because I wasn't imagining the context clearly enough. I had to think harder about what the weather was like, the light, the exact time of day. Then life seemed to come into the characters. They were like Antaeus, the figure in mythology whose strength depended on being connected to the earth.
Another curious point. While writing this novel, I often felt about eight years old. I saw the town of Attawan just as, forty-odd years ago, I saw Paris with a child's vivid sight. I think this gives the surface of the novel a bright, almost naive quality. It is a novel with very little irony in the narrative voice, though there are lots of ironies in the story itself. I'm writing another novel now, set elsewhere in Ontario, and the narrative voice is very different: very worldly, by comparison.
M&S: Why did it take so long – six years – to write?
JB: I was teaching myself how to write a novel, usually by doing everything wrong before I managed to do it right. Of course, there is no one right way to write a novel. Every novel that lives is a product of the individuality of its author. You have to embrace your own oddness before you can go forward. This can be difficult. When you see your own oddness on the page, it can be quite disconcerting. People speak of the painful self-revelation, the sense of vulnerability that comes from publishing a novel. This has less to do, I think, with exposing secrets, than with simply showing what an odd bird you are. You see the world from your own peculiar angle. The amazing thing is that your book finds its way to people who actually like that angle – it confirms something in themselves, their own oddness. We are both more odd and more alike than we realize.
M&S: Are you concerned that people in Paris will recognize themselves in the novel?
JB: Yes, but not because I put them there. The geography of Paris inspired the setting of the book, but whenever I needed models for my characters, I tended to find them in my present home, Toronto. I was like a movie-director who adopts a setting but imports actors, and for that matter, a story. No one in Paris ever burned down a mill. No union was ever formed at Penmans Ltd., the model for Bannerman's in the book. A few historical characters in the novel, such as Johnny North and Abraham Shade, are based on Paris history. But as for the rest – I went out of my way to avoid giving offence.
Still, there will be people in the town who find themselves in the book and either be delighted or offended: no doubt because they want to!
Yet, having said all that, of course a lot of boyhood memories have gone into it. As with all novelists, my characters are composites. So yes, there are probably faces, or postures, or tones of voice that I've actually observed in Paris. I've stolen them from their owners and given them to my characters. The character of Anna Macrimmon, for example, is a composite of about five different females, including my mother, my wife, a girl I fell in love with in kindergarten, and another love, from my first year at university. Even my own daughter is in there!
M&S: The Island Walkers has several major characters. Who would you say is first among them?
JB: To my mind, that would be Alf Walker. As a friend said of him, he's the "culture carrier" of the town. He knows virtually everyone in Attawan, knows a little of their history. He knows the rivers and hills, because he's grown up there. He's an authority figure to people, although he tries to deny this aspect of himself. He carries some secret of masculine maturity that his son wishes to have; no matter what Alf's faults, and he has plenty, he is a man. He bears, in his solitude, a terrible tension of guilt and divided loyalties. The fault lines of society – along issues of class, in particular – run right through him.
One of the characters early in the novel says something like, "Lose the Alf Walkers of this world, and you might as well quit right there." Well, in the novel, Alf Walker is lost. This is partly his own fault, but it's also due, I think, to the way people use him. I think we are losing our Alf Walkers, and his female equivalents. The mature, capable, self-grounded person of courage and individuality is becoming harder to find. We are paying a huge price for this.
M&S: There is a major conflict in the novel between big business and the union movement. Do you take sides in this issue?
JB: No, not in the novel. I tried to treat both business and organized labour objectively. Both are human inventions prone to manifesting human virtues and human faults.
Certainly, the more potent force in the novel, as in the world, is big business. In the book, a large company commits what many people consider a betrayal of the town. But from the company's point of view, this "betrayal" is simply standard good business practice: you set up shop where your costs are cheapest. If we want to stop this kind of thing happening we will have to control the beast of big business. Personally, I think should be done, though it would have to be done on a global scale, which would be very difficult. Capitalism is like nuclear fuel. It's tremendously powerful for generating wealth. But if you don't handle it properly – contain its forces in certain ways - it's also going to make a lot of people sick.
M&S: Where does the novel's title come from…it's very evocative.
JB: In the end it has a very mundane explanation. People in town sometimes refer to the novel's main character family, as the “Island Walkers”, because they live in a neighborhood called the Island. This is to distinguish them from the Walkers who live on the Flats.
The title also points to one of the novel's major themes: our mutual isolation. The members of the Walker family hardly know each other. They all have secrets, though at the same time they are more like each other than they realize. Alf's son Joe believes he has nothing in common with his father, but the reader knows otherwise.
M&S: There is a sense in the book of a world passing away.
JB: In some sense, this is the theme of all fiction: the breaking up of a world, and, sometimes, the passage towards a new one. We say fiction is about characters, but really, it is about worlds. The Island Walkers offers an early example – it is set in the mid-Sixties – of our current descent into a new reality, where greed is sanctified more than ever before. The people of a town are about to lose a familiar world, where they know each other, where they are well grounded. What is coming upon them like a tidal wave is the MacDonaldization of the planet: the speed, the monotony, and the destruction of the sense of place. I have tried to portray Attawan in the last moment of its wholeness.