The Island Walkers : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: The ecstacy of perfect recognition
Review: "Little of importance is now made in Attawan. It has become a bedroom town, a place for strangers, where tour buses stop for half an hour and ladies with tinted hair take quick shots of the older houses, the popular view from the bridge."

A phrase was once coined: the ecstasy of perfect recognition. It denotes the emotions one experiences at a display that touches us to the core, that captures an indefinable quality we all subconsciously recognize.

John Bemrose's Giller-nominated novel The Island Walkers is just such a book, a joyful evocation of a time and place that immediately strikes a familiar chord within the reader. In a story at once intimate yet universal, time and again Bemrose manages to sweep up his audience with a pleasurable sense that yes, this is exactly right.

It is 1965 in the small Ontario town of Attawan. The local textile mill is the subject of a corporate takeover, the dread of change is in the air, and tensions in the tiny community are swelling.

Alf Walker, a fixer at the mill, is embroiled in a possible union uprising, and becomes a hidden well of silent shame over his actions. His wife Margaret, imagining herself married beneath her middle-class English station, strives to reconcile herself to her blue-collar life, resigned to the notion that "their marriage was a fact, a fact that had somehow made its way to the core of her being and lodged there."

Meanwhile, their eldest son Joe is overwhelmed by unexpected love, daughter Penny begins to grasp realities beyond the walls of her home and son Jamie learns of mysteries and nightmares both imagined and real.

The Island Walkers (the 'Island' in the title refers to the area of town the Walkers dwell in) is very much a novel of place, both of a physical nature and of a individual's stature in society. Bemrose has an exceptional appreciation for the insular nature of a small town and its citizenry, the patent racism and mistrust of strangers and the unstated yet urgent fear of the world beyond the city limits.

Attawan, based in part on Bemrose's childhood in Paris, Ontario, is indisputably the central character, an evolving and possibly dying creature of hidden beauty and desperate malignancy. It is a place that exists in the finest literary tradition, as real and unfathomable as Charles Dicken's England, Rohinton Mistry's India and Stephen King's Maine.

The regimented framework of small-town class warfare weaves itself throughout the narrative, the understanding that everyone has their place, and any obscuring of boundaries is frowned upon, if not outright condemned. Attawan is a society where Joe will sadly note of a romantic rival "how the cuff of his pale-blue shirt was turned back with a pleasing yet casual exactness, turned back once and kept there by some magical, gravity-defying power, unlike the cuffs of his own sad shirts, which fell down constantly unless they were rolled up several times."

Despite the overwhelming quality of Bemrose's tale, serious deficiencies are present in his handling of his female characters. Margaret and Penny are given short shrift, functioning far more as objects to react against than as full-fledged participants in the Walker saga. While the Walker males undergo significant change and growth throughout, Margaret and especially Penny, while each accorded some measure of story time, remain comparative ciphers.

Nevertheless, there is such abundant virtue in The Island Walkers that it is inconceivable to not be swept along the family's path of hardship, humour, horror and resignation. Bemrose does not shy away from harsh realities. Concrete answers are few and far between, and resolutions are frustratingly absent. The Island Walkers is a near-perfect rendition of those moments in time when everything changes, and the world will never be the same.