Travels with Farley: A Memoir

Marie T. Gillis is a member of the Angus L. Macdonald Library staff at
St. Francis Xavier University.

Claire and Farley Mowat first visited the Magdalen Islands in 1968,
while researching locations for a documentary on lobster fishing. Claire
had recently miscarried and, in the emotional aftermath of that event,
both were looking for a way to move forward. They fell in love with the
wild beauty of the islands and soon acquired a summer home; for the next
seven years, they made the annual spring trek to this archipelago in the
Gulf of St. Lawrence.

To Claire’s dismay, the Mowats never really fit in with the residents
of the islands, who tended to view them with suspicion. They did become
close to a few people, and every summer visitors from elsewhere came to
enjoy the Mowats’ hospitality and the beauty of their surroundings. On
one memorable occasion, a mutual friend arranged for Pierre and Margaret
Trudeau to spend a day.

Although based in Port Hope, Ontario, and the Magdalen Islands, Quebec,
the Mowats travelled extensively during those years. Claire writes with
great feeling about places she loves, and creates indelible miniature
character studies of the people in her life. The person who is most
finely drawn in this memoir is Claire, and sometimes what she reveals is
perhaps too illuminating.

Admiring and uncritical of her husband, she rarely extends the same
gaze to others. She finds it baffling that the residents of the islands
might resent Farley’s unilateral move—in only their second summer
there—to create a national park at East Point. She shows little
empathy for the difficulties suffered by Farley’s teenage son David,
instead airing his dirty laundry for all to see. Worst of all, she uses
the opportunity of this memoir to settle an old family score with her
father-in-law’s second wife, long since dead. This might be
understandable if the continuing dispute with Barbara Mowat advanced the
story in some way, but it actually slows it down.

Nevertheless, in those parts of the book where she sets her poisoned
pen aside, Travels with Farley is still a fascinating journey,
entertaining, well-written, and sharply evocative of time and place.