Rocks and Hard Places

As an image of the resettlements forced upon the outport communities of Newfoundland and Labrador in the mid 20th century, there is none sadder or more astounding than that of a wooden house being floated miles over open water. None, that is, except the image of such a house in the opening scene of Donna Morrissey’s What They Wanted. The family we first met in her third novel, Sylvanus Now, had spurned the government deal. But now
that the fish are all gone, “sucked into the bowels of a thousand foreign factory ships,”they must launch their house into an economically plausible future. Ah, but it is a narrow channel that leads there—so narrow that the house must be sawn in half.

Houses, both divided and whole, sum up many things in this novel. Raised between two house- holds, Morrissey’s narrator Sylvie Now “always felt … just halfways home.” Abandoned outport homes stand bereft, visited by the spirits of the drowned. The strange neighbour-child, Trapp, observes family life warily, “as though he’d never seen the insides of a house before.” Houses are like souls, and souls like houses; as Sylvie says to her beloved brother, Chris, “That’s how I see you, full of voices and all boarded up.” Even Newfoundland is an unsettled house, its work-starved youngsters leaving home.

Sylvie’s father once cut a heroic figure working the sea the old way, resisting the evil of gill nets and factory trawlers. By the opening of What They Wanted the changing times have forced him to work against his own soul, as his wife puts it, and well nigh to death. Out of his element, his boat adrift, he lies in a hospital in Corner Brook while the stricken family gathers, reckoning how they will survive. And so Sylvanus’s house is divided again as his daughter and elder son head out to make fast money in the Alberta oil boom.

Whatever wistfulness there might have been in the past generation of this family’s labour— Sylvanus Now spanned the years 1949 to 1960—is replaced by a Stygian nightmare. Work on a mud-mired drill rig is a brutal purgatory of noise and dread. Isolation here is not the stalwart solitude of the lone fisherman; it is an industrial isolation—man against machine, and against inchoate, unregenerating geological forces. Mother Ocean is more fathomable than a sea of gas ten kilometres underground, and the human losses to which fishing families are inured are nothing to the inevitability of disaster that comes with “sitting on a mega bomb some stun bastard might trigger any minute.” Sylvie quotes the statistics: “Four thousand, three hundred accidents in one year—out of a crew of seven thousand, five hundred.” In the unevenness of the match the worker’s dignity is lost. “No worthy man,” she concludes, “would put himself here.”

Meanwhile, distrust and animosity fester dangerously. Freddy Four-Eyes, the “book-happy” engineer responsible for interpreting pressures and formations, is viewed with undisguised contempt; the crew would rather bet their lives on the experience of the fiendish Push, boss of the rig floor; reading the drill gauges is the unnerving Trapp, a fifth-business character caught in a vortex of hate. From her vantage point in the cookhouse, Sylvie sees the crew as “men without comfort … no thoughts, no song, no commitment or loyalty—like the houses back in Cooney Arm, emptied shells, awaiting the souls that once were to come back and inhabit them.”

The tension between science and instinct on the rig is one variant of the theme of human knowing that runs throughout this book. It is the home- schooled Sylvie who has fulfilled her mother’s old desire for travel and education: a graduate of philosophy, she has gone “through Descartes’s meditations like a miner with a pick.” But it is her teacher-mother, Adelaide, who finds the greatest consolation in philosophy, through her lifelong reading of Saint Augustine. In their bitter argument over Sylvie’s plan to pry her brother away from the “meagre scrap of life in the outports” to study art in Halifax, her mother’s defence of grateful attention to one’s own sphere may be influenced by the saint’s admonition to those who “hold their heads so high in the clouds of learning that they do not hear [Christ] saying Learn from me” (Confessions VII.9). Otherworldly knowledge is also suggested in Chris’s Jungian dreamscapes and the “spells” that overtake him, like epileptic absences—an intriguing parallel, possibly, with Augustine’s idea of a mind “seized and held still” by insight into eternity. (Whereas Sylvie’s love interest, Ben, whose literal drawings are a way of “holding things steady,” is prone to absences of a drug-related kind.) Perhaps the philosopher-saint presides over Sylvie’s ruminations on the ineffability of time, and, most importantly, over the desire of both mother and daughter for grace, that “unearned gift from God.”

Sylvie and Adelaide, at the emotional centre of the book, struggle with metaphysics in a manner that arises organically from life. Whatever the possibilities of subtextual interpretation, their characters are never abstract. It makes psychological sense for Adelaide to seek the companionship of a personable saint whose confession of failings alternates with the pondering of mysteries and emotional asides to God. Morrissey writes unpretentiously about the many levels on which life is lived and puzzled out, and closely observes the ambiguities and misfires of human relationships. And so, despite the brute material reality of What They Wanted, where the warm and briny dialogue of Morrissey’s earlier novels is replaced by raw vulgarity, the real action is interior, rooted in private struggle. Family tragedy and childhood events tie her dramatis personae to an uncanny fate, and we see how accidents of nurture or neglect leave no one untouched.

To what precise extent this autobiographical novel mirrors sad events in the author’s own life is no business of ours. Suffice it to say that Morrissey’s depiction of Sylvie’s agony when tragedy descends is the most moving description of shocked grief I have ever encountered. Equally wrenching is Adelaide’s act of confession, by which she delivers her daughter from that dark night. I leave this novel caring about these characters as if they had entered my own life, and hoping—as the last pages hint—to meet them again. Morrissey has an authentic gift not only for creating characters who live off the page, but also for bringing alive the sweep of time and fortune that is bigger than any of us. These forces are not only history and material circumstance, but also the human bonds that, in a tangled and imperfect way, shape our spiritual destiny.