Fiction/The Island Walkers By John Bemrose: Alf Walker is a silent man trapped in mounting turmoil. The textile mills he has given his working life to amounts to little more than the possibility, one day, of being made foreman. His teenage son is slowly becoming increasingly estranged from him, while Margaret, his bewildered English wife, is now a discontented stranger, who, in turn, feels she no longer knows him, by Eileen Battersby
John Bemrose's driven, intense début is set in 1960s Canada, but it looks further back in time to an earlier style of fiction. Its tone and approach is far closer to North American short stories and novels of the Depression era of the 1930-40s. This is a traditional full-hearted, sincere saga about life and love, desperate dreams and appalling realities. It is not an easy read; it strives for literary effect. Bemrose labours hard, as will the reader. It depicts The Island, a small community with too many sorrows; the central family exist in a minefield. Throughout the town all of the characters are unhappy, angry and most are caught in a relentless drifting relieved by complicated sex. Early on, one imagines how the superb US writer, Russell Banks, would have handled similar material.
There is no humour, the narrative's sheer intensity often makes it stagger under an oppressiveness that never quite reaches the profundity of Bemrose's intentions.
Here is his attempt to render a teenage boy's judgment of the girlfriend who bores him: "He was appalled by her ordinariness, by her very existence, so small and finite and limited. Her powers touched nothing beyond her, not a single blade of grass."
The Walker family live in the shadow of the Bannerman mills, the local big employer. For Alf, it represents most of his life, although he was briefly away from it, but only to fight other battles, in the second World war. The mill workers are dissatisfied and are facing the crisis usually expected to accompany the introduction of a union. It is this which implodes upon Alf and results in his both rejecting corruption, while also being dangerously compromised in the process.
As a study of one man's despair, The Island Walkers never quite develops because Bemrose fails to make the doomed Alf sufficiently interesting or even convincing, despite Alf's realisation of "his lack of real interest. Somehow his focus was still on Bannerman's . . . There were times when to be looking for work anywhere else seemed an abandonment of his principles. Of his rights."
All too quickly, however, the narrative emphasis changes to his eldest son, Joe. A clever boy weary of his current girlfriend, Joe finds his ambitions becoming displaced by his obsession with a new girl, whose arrival at the school creates further upheaval. The girl, Anna, beautiful, elusive and thinly drawn by Bemrose, is a poet whose personal chaos quickly infects Joe. She befriends Joe yet refuses to become romantically involved with him. In his upset, he then justifies becoming sexually compromised by another classmate, a rich girl whom Joe believes he dislikes - "Joe looked into Liz's cool, almost beautiful face, and hated her" - although he needs her for sex.
In contrast to his carnal obsession with Liz, is Joe's desperate romantic love for Anna. All of this is handled with an awkwardness that almost succeeds in making the reader believe in Joe's confusion. Bemrose's earnest, heavily lyric prose frequently makes the narrative jar and waver. We are expected to accept Joe as a thwarted romantic lover instead of the frustrated, banal youth he clearly is.
Considering the depths of pain he hands out to his characters, Bemrose never focuses long enough on any of them to fully explore the various dramas he places them in, leaving them underdeveloped and ultimately clichéd.
In Margaret, Alf's cultivated and depressed wife, there is a glimpse of a woman possibly considering an affair with the local rector. Instead it is Alf who drifts into an inclusive arrangement with a woman whose life consists of a succession of similar no-hope relationships with unhappily married men.
While much of the narrative centres on Joe and his ever-changing friendship with the self-dramatising Anna, there are other Walker children.
Young Jamie fears that his father will leave the family to live with his lover, the mother Billy, of one of Jamie's friends. This dread is movingly handled. But Bemrose is not content with this. He places Jamie in a situation with Billy, who is well aware of the sexual arrangement between their parents. Both boys are sexually abused by an old man. It is a particularly shocking episode, not through the force of the writing, or even through the apparent casualness of Billy, for whom it is a habit as well as a method of securing sweets, but because Bemrose simply lets it drift, aside from a reference to a nightmare.
Similarly, with Penny, the diabetic daughter of Alf and Margaret. She arrives at the home of a classmate, and within minutes, the classmate, another girl and Penny have undressed and are involved in advanced sexual experimentation which later, as Penny sleeps, becomes explicitly sexual - and this between 11 year old girls. Much is made of Penny's illness which sets her apart physically and socially. It is a disturbing episode, but not one that Penny dwells on - as would be expected - because Bemrose seems to feel she and the episode have served their purpose as narrative devices.
The Island Walkers consists of a litany of multiple injustices constructed upon characters who act as stepping stones in the slow evolution of the plot. The seams show thick and clumsily, none of the characters either engage or convince. But Bemrose's formal melodrama, with its echoes of so many stories of honourable men left wondering what happened to their lives, and of young boys seduced by the agony of true love and comforted by emotionless sex, almost succeeds through the shocking humanity of it all with its jolts of realism.
This is not an exceptional novel by the high standards of Canadian fiction. It is wordy and deliberate. Instead of tricks, flashy cleverness and easy jokes, there is a saving honesty that unsettles. It is this quality alone that could sustain a reader. The characters are forgettable, the writing is leaden, the dialogue stilted, the domestic, various relationships and employment situations all too recognisable, and Alf's fate inevitable, but as a narrative shaped by defeated lives, it is one of those stories that had to be written - probably more than it needs to be read.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Island Walkers By John Bemrose John Murray, 431pp.£17.99