Rilla of Ingleside

Rilla of Ingleside / LM Montgomery
Toronto: Seal Bantam, 1985, c1921.
277 p.

This is the last in my Anne of Green Gables series reread. I have always enjoyed this book, though the cover of my edition is not so hot. (I've been finding that my series has a strange set of covers!) Still, for some reason, I like this book. I'm not quite sure why, as Rilla herself is probably my least favourite of the Blythe children (except for Shirley -- I've never understood him, he feels like a changeling).

There are some issues for me, rereading this as an adult -- why does Rilla lisp like a little girl, especially in regards to Ken Ford? How come Rilla gets engaged secretly, raises an orphaned baby essentially on her own -- learning to finally like children -- and is happily a homebody who just wants to join the Auxiliary and take care of things, so unlike many of LMM's heroines? And what about Nan and Diana -- where is their book, the story of two modern, educated women?

Even so, this is a great read. It is different from the others; the small town gossip and funny incidents are leavened by the sudden upheaval of international events taking over everyone's lives with the arrival of World War I. I think it is one of her strongest books, due to the grappling with hard facts that the characters must experience. It is one of the only books written contemporaneously with WWI which shows the conditions of the home front, and it is marvellous at showing how life and its little dramas continue even during wartime. And it reveals how a generation lost their youth, both boys by joining up and girls by working to support war efforts as well as taking over the missing men's duties. Normal youthful escapades are subsumed under a focus on war-related activity.

This book concludes the sweeping panorama of Anne Shirley's life, unless you count the newly restored collection of short stories, The Blythes are Quoted, in which we get a glimpse into the life of the family after the war and its depredations. I've reviewed that book previously, so if you're interested, you can read about its status as a kind of sequel in my original review, when it was newly released in an edition restored by Benjamin Lefebvre. He has also just restored a new version of Rilla with all the darker bits put back in...but unfortunately I couldn't get my hands on it in time to read it as well as this familiar old one which I've just finished. I'll still get myself a copy, as it includes editorial notes, poems by LMM and many other wonderful additions.

In any case, Rilla of Ingleside takes us on a difficult journey, with two sections in particular still making me weep after all these rereads. How can a book about war not make a person cry? I wish the story had turned out a little more happily for all concerned, but it never gets overly sentimental. The practicality of Susan Baker, in the kitchen, and Mary Vance, in the town, counteracts any tendency toward sentimentality. We see the children of Ingleside and Rainbow Valley growing up, maturing, making life choices and becoming adults. It is almost a melancholy feeling, seeing Anne becoming the older generation, and getting the impression that she is fading, fading, and will be lost to us. At the same time, society itself is growing up in a way, faced with the horrors of war and the necessary adjustments both during the war years and afterward.

I think this is a very good book that deserves to be read by people who are not necessarily LMM fans; there is much to learn about Canada at a pivotal point in history, seasoned with humour and pathos.

*A 5 Hankie Read

Anne of Ingleside, and Rainbow Valley

Anne of Ingleside / LM Montgomery
Toronto: McClelland Bantam, 1983, c1939.
277 p.

Anne of Ingleside is another of the "fill-in" books that LMM wrote to please her insatiable Anne fans. It was written after Rainbow Valley and set the stage for many of its events; LMM was a consummate professional and made sure that the storylines and the characters fit, with nothing out of place and foreshadowing tipped in to books written later but taking place earlier in the chronological storyline. This was actually the last book that LMM wrote, struggling through mental agonies in her own life, but finding relief through sitting down to write and finding herself in the company of her old Avonlea and Glen St. Mary folk again.

In this book, Anne is a mother of five. After the tragic death of her firstborn daughter in Anne's House of Dreams, she had a baby boy whose arrival caused great delight at the close of that novel. Now she has three sons and twin daughters, and during this book also gives birth to her final child, a daughter, Rilla. This is another 'episodic novel', in which Anne and Gilbert interact with the strange characters living around them.

The construction of the book is very well done, with difficult situations for Anne to face both at beginning and end, and a reference to her own writing ambitions at the centre. At the start, Gilbert's Aunt Mary Maria comes to stay, and is a bitter, critical, patronizing woman who drives them all batty. Finally, Anne tries kindness, throwing a party for her 55th birthday. Aunt Mary Maria takes this effort as an insult, with Anne revealing her age to all the other women, and departs (finally!) in high dudgeon. Near the end, Anne suffers terribly as she begins to think that Gilbert no longer loves her and is interested in his old university sweetheart Christine Stuart, who is visiting the area once more. This proves to be completely false, but Anne suffers agony throughout this experience.

The rest of the book focuses on her children and their trials and tribulations as they deal with other mean children or the mockery of the adult world. A greater strain of darkness, or reality, appears in this book. As Mary Waterston says in Magic Island, "This last novel shows a surprising ability to introduce, in however veiled a manner, several modern fields of interest: aging, family studies, child psychology, childhood bullying, dysfunctional marriage."

The opening of the novel, however, is quite lovely. Anne is back in Avonlea for Gilbert's father's funeral. Despite this sad occasion, Anne stays on for a week to visit, and meeting Mrs. Lynde and Marilla again, as well as seeing Anne and Diana become girls again as they take a day to themselves to throw off responsibility and ramble through the woods, is delightful. There is a sense of the melancholy of passing time in this novel, right from the beginning as parents die, children grow up, and Anne and Diana wonder if they might meet the ghosts of their former selves as they wander home through the Haunted Wood. It's quite a sophisticated novel -- it will never be one of my frequent re-reads, I don't think, but I did appreciate it more on this reading.




Rainbow Valley / LM Montgomery
Toronto: McClelland Bantam, 1988, c1923.
225 p.

Rainbow Valley is ostensibly about Anne's children. And they are a huge part of this tale. However, another major element is the arrival of a new minister and his rag-tag family. Rev. Meredith is dreamy and inattentive, and his four children run wild. They only have an old aunt to care for the house and for themselves, and she isn't really up to the job. The Meredith children become close friends of the Blythe children, and the stories of their escapades from the bulk of the book. Through them we are given the avenue to learn about all the relationships in the town.

The Rev. Meredith also gives LMM scope to create a romantic storyline, something she excels at. Gilbert and Anne are long married and rather staid by this point, so LMM creates a story in which the widowed Reverend to fall in love with Rosemary West. Rosemary in turn falls in love with him, but lives with a severe, bossy sister Ellen who will not permit her to marry. Only through a very convoluted path and a final marriage opportunity for Ellen do Rosemary and Rev. Meredith find their happy ending.

Religion, as an institution, is a big part of this book. LMM comments on its importance to a community, and makes a few digs at her husband's own religious preoccupations, which only resonate now that we know so much about her personal life and struggles through her diaries and the academic study that has been done of her.

Much of this book reflects LMM's preoccupation with living as a minister's family. They are held to higher standards, with more social responsibility and often less income. Everyone feels they have a right to comment on the children's behaviour. As eldest daughter Faith says passionately at one point, "I'll never, never, never marry a minister, no matter how nice he is!" LMM seems to be focused on church life in this book, and is able to be severe, sarcastic, funny and respectful all at the same time. She skirts close to the edge of acceptability at times, to great effect. For example, the Meredith children befriend a runaway who has fled an abusive position as domestic servant, and discuss theology with her:

"Hell? What's that?"

"Why, it's where the devil lives," said Jerry. "You've heard of him -- you spoke about him."

"Oh, yes, but I didn't know he lived anywhere. I thought he just roamed around. Mr. Wiley used to mention hell when he was alive. He was always telling folks to go there. I thought it was some place over in New Brunswick where he come from."

While this one has never been one of my favourites, it is entertaining reading in parts. It's not as "Anne-ish" as one might expect from a book in this series, but I find that as the series goes on, Anne rather fades away into a motherly presence in the background. I'm glad that LMM returned to some of Anne's internal life in Anne of Ingleside. Sequels and prequels are not new to the movie business, but the difference is that LMM is such a skilled writer that her 'prequels' fit perfectly into the chronological reading of this series, with no false notes or missteps. She is a talented, skilled writer who has proven her enduring appeal, and I am glad that she is getting the critical appreciation that she deserves.

Anne's House of Dreams

Anne's House of Dreams / LM Montgomery
Toronto: McClelland-Bantam, 1983, c1922.
230 p.

Next in line in my LMM rereading project is Anne's House of Dreams. In this book, #5 in the Anne series, Anne and Gilbert have finally been married. Gilbert, now a doctor, is taking over his uncle's practice in Glen St. Marys, a town on the other side of PEI from Avonlea. It is right on the shore, at Four Winds Harbour, and Anne comments on the nearness of the ocean, something that wasn't evident in Avonlea at all. Once again, not sure the cover artist read the books...Gilbert has red hair! At least I hope that is supposed to be Gilbert walking arm in arm with Anne... ;)

This is one of my favourites of the series. While I do miss Avonlea -- it doesn't appear much after the first chapter or two, and Marilla and Rachel spend a Christmas at the House of Dreams, which felt weird and I seriously felt sad thinking about Green Gables alone and dark at Christmas! -- I also love this new setting for Anne.

The House of Dreams is a quaint cottage with a fireplace for Gog and Magog to sit alongside, with little glass cabinets, with a yard and trees and a brook in the corner. Here Anne lives the happy early days of her marriage and has her first experience of maternity. There are some twee references to pregnancy throughout the book, but Anne's first birth is anything but twee. She meets the first awful, unbearable moment of her life in the birth and death of her first daughter, Joy. LMM wrote this book during a time of struggle in her own life, and used her own experiences to colour Anne's life. In this instance, she used her emotions and reactions to the death of her second son, Hugh John. It is quite heart wrenching and emotional -- very raw. LMM also brings in questions of why such things happen, and questions the cultural niceties of accepting things like this as "god's will".

I really like this book because of the new sense of community that LMM creates at Four Winds Harbour. Anne and Gilbert have neighbours on all sides, and they are all fascinating. Captain Jim lives down at the lighthouse, and he is an old sailor who is full of tall tales and whimsy. Cornelia Bryant is an absolutely hilarious man-and-Methodist-hating woman full of spit and vinegar. Her constant refrain of "isn't that just like a man?" made me laugh, repeatedly. Her surprise ending, while perhaps not entirely predictable or believable, was still delightful. And then there's the most dramatic, thrilling storyline ... that of Leslie Moore, a beautiful middle-aged woman who is saddled with a husband who is brain damaged after a bar fight in the tropics. She is a touchy, depressed, melancholic woman with few friends, due to her shame about her husband (nasty before the accident) and her conflated sense of suffocation and duty. Each of these characters has a bit of LMM in them, and she lets her frustrations arise in the character of Leslie Moore (as Elizabeth Waterston points out in Magic Island, this character has the same initials as Lucy Maud herself.)

All of these stories weave together to make a very tightly constructed book that focuses on adult themes and the darker side of experience. I found this to be more of a novel than some of the other books in the series, which can sometimes read like a collection of brief stories or anecdotes (though always enjoyable!) I hadn't remembered much of this from my last reading, years ago. And I found it well done, full of interesting characters and situations, with of course much description of the natural world -- especially the ocean, which hasn't figured highly in the previous books.

All in all, I think this one takes its place as one of my favourites of the series, next to the first and original Green Gables. This isn't particularly due to Anne though; it's more the other, new characters, and the lovely House of Dreams which I covet. But reading the whole series at once is proving to be a great way to feel familiar with all the stages of Anne's life, and the characteristics of each. I am feeling a bit of the disillusionment of adulthood in Anne as she ages, and becomes more sensible and less fey, situated in her family life. There are parts to like about each of these life stages, but also a certain restriction of possibility. It's a strange feeling to read through somebody's life like this; it makes me wish LMM had written Anne into grandmotherly status. As it is we can just dream and surmise where their lives will go...

Anne of Windy Poplars

Anne of Windy Poplars / Lucy Maud Montgomery
Toronto: McClelland Stewart, 1983, c1936.

This volume of the Anne series, #4 chronologically, was actually written much later than the others in the series. It was a 'fill in' book, designed to cover the gap between Anne's graduation from Redmond and engagement to Gilbert, and their marriage three years later. According to Elizabeth Waterston's Magic Island, when LM Montgomery came to write this one, she spent time rereading her earlier books to reacquaint herself with the girlishness of the young Anne, and to make sure she wouldn't contradict anything she'd written in the later books. She was a careful and precise writer, and spent a lot of time seeding events and characters between the books.

In this book, Anne has become principal of Summerside High School, and encounters a whole set of new characters. The style of the book is primarily epistolary, with Anne writing Gilbert amusing letters about her experiences in Summerside. There are also more traditionally narrative chapters interspersed, and a few visits home to Avonlea in the school breaks.

In this book Anne is going out into the world and finding her place as an independent woman. (As an aside I am not sure that the illustrator of the books I own ever really read the books...in this one Anne is principal of the high school in the second largest city in PEI, not a teacher at a one room schoolhouse any longer.) One thing I did find a little odd about this one upon my reread was how little time Anne spends at Green Gables -- even when she goes home for her school breaks, she spends weeks staying with others, and going off to various places for weddings and so on. We hardly see Marilla and Rachel Lynde at all.

Summerside is full of entertaining characters -- her elderly landladies are the combination frequently found in LMM's work: Aunt Kate, a stern sister and Aunt Chatty, a dithery, sweet one. They are assisted by a distant relative as housekeeper, the practical Rebecca Dew. And of course, The Cat, Dusty Miller.

Anne also has to deal with the Pringles, the first family of the town who already have a grudge against her because she got the job they thought their male third cousin should have had. After much struggle and amusing coincidences Anne gets the upper hand and the Pringles swing around to support her. She also interacts with Little Elizabeth from next door, a frail, elfin child from next door who is being raised by her stern grandmother and cruel housekeeper, after being abandoned to their care by her absent father after her mother's death. Another important character is her prickly coworker Katherine Brooke. She is a dark, drab, miserably unhappy woman who hates teaching but must make her living. She has a sarcastic tongue which her students live in fear of. Of course, Anne eventually wins her over as well, after finding out her depressing back story -- the dual miracles of a Christmas trip and Green Gables turn Katherine around, giving her a happy ending of leaving teaching at the end of the year and getting a position as secretary to a "globe trotting MP".

The interesting thing about some of these characters is that they reflect aspects of LMM herself. As Elizabeth Waterston suggests, the repressed and lonely Little Elizabeth has the same situation that LMM grew up with, with the difference that Little Elizabeth has the happy ending of her father returning and taking her away with him, happily. Kathryn seems to personify LMM's unhappiness with her lot in life and the way in which societal expectations chafed her as well as being a kind of acknowledgement of her depressive states.

In any case, I've always been fond of this volume of the series but found on rereading that I wasn't as drawn in as previously. It uses lots of episodic chapters with stories of the people around Anne, which LMM does extremely well, but for myself, I could wish for a little more Green Gables in it. There is one lovely bit right near the beginning that I found just as charming as ever, though, and that was Anne stating in one of her first letters to Gilbert that this wouldn't be a love letter, as she had a scratchy pen, and obviously, love letters can not be written with a scratchy pen! But, having written with a fountain pen that didn't feed ink very easily, I know exactly what she meant ;)

Another enjoyable volume in this series, and because of its being written out of sequence it does have a bracing touch of the darker elements that LMM included in some of her later works. A worthy epistolary novel, and still dear to me.

Anne & Avonlea & The Island

Anne of Avonlea / Lucy Maud Montgomery

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984, c1909.

277 p.

Anne of the Island / Lucy Maud Montgomery
Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1987 , c1915.
244 p.


I've been rereading the Anne series, ever since I got the bug and reread Anne of Green Gables for the Readathon in October. I am enjoying revisiting these books, and the further along I get, the more I realize I've forgotten about the contents of the later books in the series.

In these two, Anne is teaching in the Avonlea school (two years) and then goes to Redmond College (four years). I never really connected with the Avonlea years as deeply as the first and third books; I was always impatient for Anne to get to college, and to find her kindred spirits and to move into Patty's Place, a home I always wished for during my own college years. One of the defining elements of Patty's Place, besides the scenery and the congenial roommates, was the pair of china dogs on the mantelpiece -- named Gog and Magog. I once mentioned these two during a conversation as a young teenager and was reprimanded for swearing ;)

Still, a reread is a marvellous thing. During this time through, I saw much more in Anne of Avonlea. Knowing how little time I'd be spending in Avonlea as I read further along in the series I relished each moment, and each of the characters who represent Avonlea at its finest. The innocence and the enthusiasm of youth, as Anne and her fellow educated young men and women form AVIS (the Avonlea Village Improvement Society), was fun and entertaining. As usual Anne finds her way into the centre of mishaps, as when the community hall that AVIS has raised money to rejuvenate gets painted a horrendously bright blue. There are light moments and there are more somber moments: Ruby Gillis, the light, flirty character from earlier books comes down with TB, and her discussions with Anne about dying and her fear of death really made me tear up. Anne grows up a bit through her hard work as a schoolteacher; her non-violent disciplinary principles are challenged by one student in particular, and another student leads her toward another romantic plot in which she plays a role in connecting lost lovers (a common occurrence for Anne). And of course, she develops a true friendship with Gilbert Blythe, who had given her the Avonlea school so that she could stay near Marilla, at the end of Anne of Green Gables.

Once Anne heads to Kingsport, Nova Scotia, and Redmond College, in Anne of the Island, I feel like Anne's future really begins. I loved this book, and the reread held up. There are a wider range of characters, some who are silly but loveable, some who are simply silly. And Anne experiences her first wild romance, with the dashing but ultimately dull Royal Gardner. I enjoyed these characters, the sense of freedom the girls had studying for their BAs (a big deal then), the friendships and camaraderie. Also, I really liked the idea, even as a very young woman, of having time to simply study -- I was always bookish, and this ideal led me to consider university a non-negotiable step in my life. The wider scope of her social circle and her classmates was also fascinating, and in this book, I felt like the entire story was based on Anne rather than being simply an episodic story of Anne's community and all its funny inhabitants.

Something I noticed in both books however, was Anne's resistance to romantic entanglements. She seems almost neurotically resistant to any of Gilbert's attempts to express his feelings for her, even while she knows exactly what he wants to say. He finally does speak, and it causes an estrangement, only broken finally when Anne hears a local report that Gilbert is dying. Anne pushes away all hint of romance and/or sexuality with an insistence that seems a bit excessive, especially considering that her best friend Diana was married at 18 and is already a mother by this time.

In Elizabeth Waterston's Magic Island, she discusses the elements that were present in Lucy Maud Montgomery's life at the time she wrote each of her books. The stresses she was under, the earlier incidents in her life that may show up in her writing, and her varied reading that influenced her are all part of these discussions. It is fascinating to read each brief chapter along with each book. Some of the highlights for me in regards to these two books were:

In Avonlea, LMM is delaying Anne's romantic trajectory; the romance in the book deals with the successful conclusion of another long-delayed romance, with Anne's assistance of course. This reflects LMM's own drawn-out engagement, as she wouldn't marry until her grandmother had passed. Also, one of the inspirations for the theme of "village beautification" in this book was LMM's reading of Elizabeth of the German Garden, one of my own favourites and an author with whom LMM felt a kinship.

LMM originally wanted the title of Anne of the Island to be Anne of Redmond, reflecting the focus of the book. But in this book, Anne does self-identify as an Islander, denying that she is a Nova Scotian even though she was born there, so perhaps that is why the title change fits. Also, Waterston argues that while the implied emphasis is on academia, Anne remains within the traditional Island expectations for womanhood, and ends up spending most of the book dealing with romantic entanglements of her roommates and eventually of her own, with the end neatly tied up with an engagement. I still think that the drive Anne has to succeed and come first in 'the lists' after exams is a powerful statement about ambition, but perhaps Waterston is correct, as later books show Anne fading in her intellectual prowess and settling in as mother of a large family.

In any case, these are fascinating reading, and I will continue this series side-by-side with the commentary on how they fit into LMM's life as she was writing them. Have you read them all? Are you an inveterate re-reader of Anne? Which volume is your favourite, if so? I'm not sure yet which is mine at this point in my life...I always loved Green Gables best as a child, but will see how this rereading shifts things!

Saltsea, a PEI Idyll

Saltsea / David Helwig
TO: Biblioasis, c2006.

Another tour de force for Helwig. I'm so glad I discovered this author last year, through Porcupine's Quill Press and with the incentive of the 1st Canadian Book Challenge. Now I'm back for the CBC II with this full-length novel set in PEI.

This novel is a type I am particularly fond of: it takes a location, here the specific house which becomes the hotel Saltsea, and traces the lives of those who pass through it. Of course, this kind of story could go on forever, so the events of the novel are limited to a few weeks of a summer pretty much in our present. People arrive at the hotel, small things happen, relationships are formed and/or dissolved, people leave the hotel -- and more people arrive, whose stories we'll never hear. In the last few pages of the novel, all of the people we've been following are leaving, the story is changing, and into this comes an observant little girl, Eleanor. She's come with her family, her parents and two little sisters Helena and Melanie. She looks at some of the things left behind by the departing guests and interprets them completely differently than those who'd left them behind; I loved this about the story. Many of the characters are shown viewing the same occurrence and coming to completely different conclusions, and Helwig lets this be. He doesn't try to explain which is the REAL reason behind something, the point is that everyone sees something different in every moment.

While reading this, I was reminded of Vonnegut's comment on fiction: "The plot is just a bribe." While there is a plot in this novel, it serves to propel the story to a moment of closure but is not the purpose of the telling. The reward in reading this comes from savouring the specificity of a butterfly clinging to a stalk of grass with tiny feet, or feeling yourself in the hotel on a rainy night entertaining one another with music and recitations. It comes from recognizing how strange and lonely/alone every human being is, and how our relationships result from our need for connection.

There is a feeling of Virginia Woolf here, a Woolf of To the Lighthouse or The Waves. In the minutiae of human interaction there is also a hint of Henry James, though the action is more earthy. The impetus of the story is love, in all its forms -- love, lust, affection, friendship, hatred. And it is marvellously told. Helwig's talent creates each individual in this crowded cast of characters as someone with a full and present existence. He provides backstory and all the little quirks of individual behaviour without overwhelming us with detail. He also writes precise, to the point observations of the natural world. No rambling 'sunset' paragraphs, just one or two lines thrown in which nonetheless bring the setting to life in full 3D reality: scent, sight, sound, even tastes and textures. For example:

Robin was cycling home in the dark... She had a lamp on the front of her bike, and she knew the way, but still the darkness was very large and her bit of illumination crossing it was very small...the brightness of the stars made her aware of the huge cold spaces that surrounded her, made her breathe deeply and and listen to the sound of her wheels on the pavement. You could vanish into that great night of space, an image fading to black, a hint that romance and horror may lie behind any moment of time, or so the movies believe. They have no love for the quotidian, the tiny blessings.

The power of his writing, and his love for the quotidian, is one reason I've become so fond of Helwig's work so quickly. I feel while reading that not only am I experiencing an enjoyable story, I am also learning how to create a fictional world which is so real is feels more like a memory than something read. Just listen to these opening lines:

Birdsong, wind: here by the ocean every noise was surrounded by silence that reached all the way to the stars. Monica studied the white shingled building above the slope of green lawn, deep bays rising two storeys on each side of the front door and the windowed porch. You felt the big rambling construction must have a memory, old thoughts. Listen, I am the voice of what once was. I am as real as the beating of your hungry heart.

Memory is the other primary theme of the novel. The memory of a building for its past, shown through characters like Barbara, whose industrialist father once owned the house, before Barbara and her hippie friends inhabited the deserted building as young adults. Each character has a history which is carefully and slowly revealed through narrative and internal dialogue, much as the archaeological grad student camping below Saltsea digs up artifacts of the recent past. This digging up of lives is balanced at the end of the book by the focus on Eleanor, a young girl without much chance of having a past, not yet. Saltsea's place as a retreat away from all this life and busy-ness is revealed by the current owner, Lawrence Gardiner, as he muses while falling asleep one night, thinking about his former career as a diplomat:

The life he lived here was outside of history. Saltsea was a place for contemplation, where men and women indulged themselves in the slowness of pleasure, like the mandarin in his garden, thoughts moving in the measured strokes of a fine calligraphy. At worst, pinchbeck paradise. Perhaps leisure allowed a man or woman to grow aware of the specific gravity of the personality -- a high flown phrase, but all the same, when you put it that way, you saw that there was a point to their work, that clean laundry, even, had its justification, its meaning.

There are a few characters I dislike, but not because of any flaws in their realization, rather because they are so real, and so disagreeable. I am impressed by Helwig's ability to create a story so fascinating out of not much at all. Most of the shocking action takes place off-stage, so to speak, in memory and recollection, although the younger characters do get up to some of their own particular memory-making. It's a book to read while on vacation, or even as a vacation; the narrative voice is slow and deliberate and it takes some time to get to know all the players. The rewards are well worth the effort, though.
This book has started off my year of Canadian Book Challenging on a high note.
Definitely recommended.

Acorn's Island

The Island means Minago / Milton Acorn

New Canada Press, c1975.

I've been so busy making reading plans for the new year, I haven't been looking back enough -- and I have a slew of reviews to catch up on. I'll call this my week of reviews and try to talk a bit about some of the books I read as the year was turning over.

First off, there's this book of poetry and essays, by Milton Acorn. I would not have read this one if it hadn't been chosen by Yann Martel in his quest to get our Prime Minister to read. But it was, and I thought it might also be an interesting book about PEI for the Canadian Book Challenge; I will of course be reading lots of LM Montgomery in this 100th year since the publication of Anne of Green Gables, but something PEI and not Montgomery sounded interesting. And interesting was what I got with this one.

Acorn was a poet and an activist, commonly known in his time as "The People's Poet". This book is published by NC Press, and is very seventies. On the copyright page, it reads "NC Press publishes books and pamphlets that will be of assistance in the Canadian People's struggle for national liberation." The poetry and especially the essay on the revolutionary history of Prince Edward Island gives me the impression that if Milton Acorn hadn't been a poet and a part of the literary community he'd have been just another of the nutty conspiracy theorists accosting everyone in the public library. This collection reflects its time as well as Acorn's strong political opinions.

Still, some of the poetry is quite striking, and the essay on PEI points out some fascinating items I hadn't considered, notwithstanding my BA in Canadian History. One of these things is how the fact that PEI was settled by tenant farmers of absentee landlords reflected itself in the landscape. The curving roads, the screening bluffs of trees, all assisted in the resistance to tax collectors approaching for their take. As he says when people remark how pretty PEI is, 'it was formed by revolution'. There is a feeling of dusty idealism to the poetry and the historical rants; still, it is somehow charming. In Yann Martel's essay to the Prime Minister about this book, he states :

The Island Means Minago represents yet another thing a book can be: a time capsule, a snapshot, a museum shelf of old dreams—that is, a reminder of a past future that never became (but is perhaps still worth dreaming about).

I concur. Here is one of the (non-political) poems I most enjoyed:

Trout Pond

The woods, spruce twisted

into spooky shapes

echo the trickle of water

from raised oars.

Above pale ripples

a redwing blackbird fastens

legs crooked and beak alert,

to a springing reed.

My father's whiteheaded now,

but oars whose tug

used to start my tendons

pull easily these years.

His line curls, his troutfly drops

as if on its own wings,

marks a vee on the mirrored

ragged spruceheads, and

a crane flapping past clouds.

(once again Blogger has no poetic soul and will not let me space the verse correctly. It is written in 4 stanzas, the first 3 with 4 lines and the final stanza holding 5. Argh.)