Sylvanus Now by Donna Morrissey

As part of our ‘Wilderness Week‘ series:

Sylvanus Now is a fisherman, living in Newfoundland in the 1950s, ‘poor at book learning’, but who knows and loves this savage sea and land. ‘Undoubtedly, as a feathered creature shapes and grows into its habitat, so was he woven into the fabric of this land.’ One evening, glimpsing the proud and distant Adelaide through the window at a dance, he falls instantly and deeply in love. But Adelaide only dreams of escape, escape from the poverty, misery and drudgery of life in the small outport of Ragged Rock. Despite her strong academic abilities Adelaide is forced to leave school to work on the flakes – where the fish caught by the men is salted and preserved – and contribute to the income of her large, unruly family. Knowing that education or money are the only ways out of this life she despises, Adelaide resents bitterly the closing of this door.

Sylvanus is everything Adelaide scorns, a simple fisherman who lives across the bay in an even smaller grouping of houses, Cooney Arm. When Sylvanus courts her, promising her a house of her own and guaranteeing that she will never have to salt another fish, she succumbs to his charm and the temptation of getting away from her ugly, over-run home and back-breaking work. But Adelaide’s anger at the world has not subsided and her heart continues to rebel against this enforced destiny.

This novel is the story of their love but it is also much more that that. It is the story of a woman coming to terms with the world around her, making choices and finding her way.

It is the story of two people struggling to find each other while the world around them is evolving with small, imperceptible but significant changes. Huge trawlers from all over the world are coming to pillage the rich Newfoundland fishing waters. The industry is moving away from the small individual fisherman catching and salting his catch to crews trawling the ocean’s bottom, freezing onboard and delivering fresh fish to the factories.

Sylvanus Now is peopled with memorable characters; Eva, Sylvanus’s mother who lost her husband and eldest son to the sea; Suze, who insists on being Adelaide’s friend no matter how often Adelaide pushes her away; Manny and Jake, Sylvanus’s two brothers who, along with Sylvanus, try to find a place for themselves in the uneven battle against the trawlers. With clear-eyed humanity, Donna Morrissey has managed to capture the extraordinary in ordinary people.

Throughout the novel, the wild, unfriendly Newfoundland landscape and seascape is the enormous, inescapable canvas on which the human drama is painted, influencing all human action and choice. There is an inextricable bond between the people and their enviroment giving them a sense of proportion and belonging even if they are ‘little more than a drop of rain before his immersion into that great sea.’

‘The sea was a dirty grey crashing upon the rocks. Soon with the failing light, and aside from the sparkles of plankton rippling like stars long the catacomb shoreline, she would be black. But he didn’t need to see her. Like the land, she, too, had been imprinted into his brain. He knew her every fit, her every calm – from her ripples as she stirred with the first breath of morning into wavelets as the breeze taunted her further. Best of all, her laziness beneath an easy wind, how her long, slow swells lent a greater buoyancy to his boat. And he knew, too, how quickly those swells could deepen and be whipped into twenty-foot peaks by squalling winds, and how to get the hell home afore those peaks crested and toppled, toppling him and his boat, too, if he were too heavy with fish.’

Donna Morrissey’s prose is a thing of joy. It is exuberant, distinctive, full of the Newfoundland character and dialect.

But it is hard to dissect Sylvanus Now and indicate what works about it, in the same way that it’s hard to say exactly what it is that gives a bird in flight its grace. The setting, the story, the characters, the prose all combine to create, quite simply, a beautiful novel.

Penguin Books Canada (May 2005), 332 pages, ISBN-10: 0143014250