| It’s been a long day for Donna Morrissey. Our meeting is something like the eighth or ninth for her, and she’s a little jumpy. In discussing her new novel, Sylvanus Now, I can’t help but see the same weary brightness in her personality that she gives to the characters in the book.
It’s a dark work, and its mythological structure conceals the pain and turmoil behind it, only grasping you at the end. Some have likened it to a fable, a comparison that seems appropriate, although Morrissey herself is surprised to hear it.
"I wanted to tell it in a way that wouldn’t sound like a history lesson," she says, referring to the book’s backdrop, the decline of the Newfoundland fishing industry in the latter half of the 20th century. "It’s easy to lose the human element; we’re not just figures and numbers. When I saw the stress that some of my uncles and the fishermen around Newfoundland were suffering, it’s not about a job. It’s not like you can go find another one."
Sylvanus, the fisherman hero of her novel, "is a character who has woven himself around the sea – it’s part of his soul." In the book, he quickly finds himself to be one of the last of his kind. Morrissey has written more than a swan song to his culture, however. The book also contains a love story that deals with the confines, joys and struggles that these people experienced.
"I opened up this book wanting to tell the story of a man whose identity got stripped away from him by a changing culture," says Morrissey. "Addie snuck in there and almost swallowed the book. I had to fight her back."
Addie, short for Adelaide, is Sylvanus’s wife. Although a supportive rock for her husband to lean on, she also has profound difficulties with the fishing life.
"Like any culture, there are those who find a fit, and those who don’t," says Morrissey. "Adelaide was someone who was very unhappy. She’s very much modelled after my mother. You wake up and hear the shifting and moaning of the sea, and it’s something you either loved or hated. Some people feared it. But it was a living thing, and it was there, and as much as my dad loved it, my mother hated it."
Morrissey’s novel conjures a way of life vaguely remembered by some, imagined by others, where men created the romantic vision and the women maintained it.
"It was a very Old World culture," says the Halifax-based writer, who was raised in a small Newfoundland fishing community called The Beaches. "Even I grew up with no roads or electricity. Roles were very clearly defined: women did the birthing and the burying and the housekeeping, the men did the hunting, fishing and logging. It was a complementary world, and it worked for those who wanted it."
In the book, Sylvanus describes himself as a "farmer, not a hunter," and Morrissey is adept at creating a palpable sense of the distress and loss that these people must have felt when they saw their way of life disintegrating before their eyes.
"With the demise of the fishing industry, we had 20,000 fishermen who were banished from the sea, most of who will never go back," she says. "Right now you have the industry changing into another kind of fishery, a shellfishery, but it’s the same thing happening again. When it was the cod fishery, you had so many people, biologists and others, thinking, ‘What an expensive lesson we’ve learned, what destruction.’ We really thought we’d learned something mighty, and it’s not so. Nothing has changed."
The book moves from the postwar years into the 1960s, when massive commercial fishing began to decimate the cod stocks. Morrissey says that in 1968 alone, 300,000 tonnes of fish were sucked from the spawning grounds. "The end was quick when it came," she says.
Today, the loss is something that many Canadians have forgotten. "People got desensitized to it, the overfishing of the Grand Banks, the buildup of the offshore fishing fleets," says Morrissey. "That’s all you’d hear on the news, and it doesn’t tell the whole story."
To this day, the Newfoundland and federal governments offer excuses that would seek to hide and reallocate the blame. "It’s all bullshit," Morrissey says. "‘Oh, the waters were too cold, the seals were too abundant.’ Maybe that did play a minor role, but it’s the kind of role that nature can overcome. It’s only when we threw in the colossal, leviathan trawlers, scraping and sucking 24 hours a day, that nature found it couldn’t keep up."
Following this aftermath – 45,000 people were relocated by the government following the collapse of the fishery – distorted views of the East Coast became entrenched and are still unchanged today.
"This is a huge country with a rich and diverse culture, and instead of learning about it, it’s stigmatized and ignored," says Morrissey. "Not a lot of people had respect for the fishermen, even the University of Newfoundland and the government. They saw the fishing as an old-fashioned, dirty way of being. But guess what? The fishermen weren’t embarrassed – they loved who they were, fishing alone in their boats, in the open sea and sky. They didn’t really want this modernization bit; with the rise of offshore fishing, they all saw the germ of its own demise coming. What was surprising to them was that the government did nothing about it."
Morrissey’s novel is perhaps the best way to remember a way of life that will soon only exist in memory, and she’s glad to have documented it.
"I don’t know if you choose to write a novel, as much as it comes through you," she says. "If something happened to you yesterday, you can’t sit down and talk objectively about it. It’s still working its way through you. I am the voice of my community and my family, and it’s fitting that I write their stories, because I have that objectivity, I hope. We each have our own myth, and live according to it. At some point the challenge is to recognize what it is, straighten it out and hang it up." |
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