Squatter's Island

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

No man is an island, as John Donne once said — but many of us sometimes wish we could be. Certainly this is the case with Andrew, the young protagonist of W.D. Barcus’s fine novel, Squatter’s Island. Raised by a stern father after his mother deserts them and mocked by the neighbourhood boys with that easy and unerring cruelty with which the young chastise the sin of difference, Andrew longs for the refuge promised by Squatter’s Island. His happiest memories are of visits with his father to that uninhabited island plainly visible from the harbour — but now his father has forsaken the sea and the island both, and keeps a store in the village. Joe Ramos, a fisherman of Portuguese descent, and so an outsider like Andrew himself, befriends the boy, and Andrew’s diminished loneliness is bearable until the old man’s dory capsizes within sight of shore, and Andrew is powerless to save him. Eventually the boy leaves Nova Scotia for Newfoundland, where he finds work on a road gang and marries Molly, a country girl. Upon his return home, his uncomprehending wife merely resents his fascination with the island; sickness and surgery leave her unable to bear children, and Andrew’s father suffers a stroke which leaves him helpless. At the novel’s close, the island remains unattainable and Andrew, like his father before him, turns his baffled strength to the walls which close around him.

The best thing about Squatter’s Island is its economy of means. The author sagely foregoes any attempt at “fine writing” — a restraint particularly appropriate to the kind of minimalist tragedy he depicts. The island lost with childhood, forever clean to eye and memory, and yet forever beyond Andrew’s reach, is the central symbol in this novel barren of rhetorical flourishes but rich in psychological truth. The author’s unwavering discipline spares us cheap sentiment either for hope or despair; avoiding the cardinal sin of protesting too much. W.D. Barcus, in the story of one Nova Scotia boy, deftly lays bare the minuscule links of the chains which bind us all.