The Bridge Out of Town

Lydia Burton was an editor and writer living in Toronto, and was co-author of Editing Canadian English.

Some of these stories have been published elsewhere, although the acknowledgments do not, unfortunately, give publication dates. Collected here, in a very attractive book, they give an unsentimental sense of contemporary small-town Canada at the fringe of the rural environment. Individually, these stories seem incomplete, but together they have a substantial impact. This effect is achieved partly because some of the characters and the town of Keewuttunee appear in most of them: Sonny Copenace and Diana Highway live on the local reserve and work in the town; John Murphy and Alain Chaput are the town’s police constables. Fisherman Jim Hudson and two or three other characters appear in other stories.

Nothing very much happens in Keewuttunee: some petty thievery and vandalism, drunkenness and camaraderie, the appearance of American tourists who come to fish, and Germans who come to get fit in what they consider the wild Canadian back country. In a thoroughly believable way, MacDonald suggests the invisible barriers between the locals themselves, the Natives and the white Canadians. Trappers and guides from both groups may have more in common with each other than with well-off visitors and summer residents, but the powerlessness of one group is necessarily set off against the authority of the other. The distinction is not always a racial one, however. The white migrant workers from Saskatchewan (“the Vagabonds”) are also at the mercy of the “establishment.” Still, no one in town is very well off most of the men drink too much and may raise hell on Saturday night. Outsiders are sometimes taken advantage of. Unnecessary deaths of local boys cause anguish to people who cannot adequately express their feelings.

These are quiet stories — but not gentle ones. Their tough unsentimentality helps to establish the smell of poverty and the dead-end of small-town Canadian life in the backwater. Some characters, like Constable Chaput, seek closer relationships with others in the community, but primarily these stories document failed efforts at communication. The inability of both the Natives and whites to move beyond double standards, frustrated expectations, and cultural differences makes the tragedies and sometimes misguided actions in these small stories even more poignant.