Submariner's Moon

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views
of Canada, 1880–1914.

There is a great deal of passion in this book, as if its author—like
many of his characters—is purging himself of anger and frustration,
knowing that he (and they), like the ships silhouetted by a
“submariner’s moon,” are helplessly exposed to the “cold
merciless sheen” of death. And this passion invests these
stories—set mainly in St. John’s and peopled by Newfoundlanders
either at home or at war (World War I)—with such a sense of tragedy,
which, at the same time, makes them hauntingly familiar and
irresistible.

A brilliant stylist, adept at physical description, McNeill has written
seven stories that are linked thematically, not merely by their
Newfoundland setting but also by the precarious hold on life this
setting imposes on each character. They span a wide range of
experiences, from the Battle of the Somme in “Merrymeeting Road”; to
Lindbergh’s landing in “Cosy”; to an expatriate brother’s
unhappy return home in “Boggers” (my own favorite being “A Passage
to India”). And in them all, McNeill transcends the purely local to
explore the universal—the complexity of human relationships, of the
sometimes incomprehensible influence of “homeland,” and of the
mystery of death resonant beyond those rocky shores. These are
fascinating stories, told by a writer who may be trying to “free
himself from the tyranny of the past.”