Will Ye Let the Mummers in?

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Reading this last collection of Alden Nowlan’s short pieces, one feels a personal sorrow that so fine a talent has been cut short. He has left a rich legacy, as exemplified in Will Ye Let the Mummers in? Twenty-two short stories of great insight and power tell of life in the Maritimes he loved, and of the human condition, in which, as the old song would have it, “nothing is as I would wish it to be....” The title story, to which the book owes its arresting cover, reveals the yawning gulf that so often divides those who reach out in hope of finding friendship, doomed to defeat by forces they do not understand — indeed, of which they are unaware. Nowlan’s was a rare humour and a still more uncommon way with words; both are here employed to best advantage.