Trouble and Desire

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.

Is there a distinct Newfoundland voice? Perhaps not, for the island’s
people are such a polyglot—Irish, French, Native, English (Cornish,
Devon, Welsh)—and their religions (particularly Catholic and
Protestant) have keep them so insulated from each other, that there are
many voices, each rich with metaphorical diction and poetic nuance. And
yet once in a while, along comes a writer who, though distinctly
original and refreshingly cosmopolitan, can be recommended to
non-Newfoundlanders as ideal to read if one seeks to understand the
Newfoundland psyche.

Robin McGrath is that kind of writer. She certainly writes out of an
Irish-Catholic tradition, and is as well acquainted (both as fictional
settings and real places) with Edmonton and Unuvik as St. John’s, but
in most of her stories she evokes that essential ambience, that sense of
family that is Newfoundland. That she loves the place is certain—the
place “being the people she knows, whose past always impinges on their
present.”

In such stories as “A Wishbone in the Sea” and “Watching the
Street,” McGrath offers us glimpses that make us imagine the larger
context, revealing relationships that take on cosmic meanings. For she
is a masterful storyteller, colloquial and folkloric at one moment,
deftly metaphorical at another. And, above all, she has an eye for the
particular and peculiar, especially the particularity of speech, which
can often be taken at face value or, looked at more closely, conveys a
very subtle irony. In short, McGrath is a superb short-story writer, one
from whom we will hear more.