Grogan's Cafe

Burke Cullen teaches English at the University of Toronto.

Grogan’s Café follows the picaresque, episodic adventures of the
19-year-old narrator/protagonist, Terry Belshaw, during his eight-month
initiation into the world of West Coast logging camps. Set in the 1950s,
the novel portrays a way of life that has defined much of the remote
coastal logging communities until very recently. As such, it makes a
greater contribution to the social chronicles of the logging subculture
of B.C. than to its close cousin, backwoods lore. Early in the novel,
Trower’s reference to M.A. Grainger’s pioneering work Woodsmen of
the West clearly attempts to establish Grogan’s Café within the same
genre. Trower’s novel shares with Grainger’s an autobiographical
component as well as the central setting and subject matter of West
Coast logging camps. (Trower even includes a unique glossary of logging
terms.) Whereas Grainger’s rough-hewn collection of sketches and tales
still defies easy classification (even now, one can find it catalogued
under both forestry and fiction) Grogan’s Café proceeds as a fairly
conventional story in a realist mode.

Terry works his way in and out of various isolated camps, and between
these, falls into short-order cooking for an ex-logger with a past,
Davies Grogan. As Belshaw learns the ropes of logging, he becomes a keen
observer of the unusual cast of men and women who make backwoods life
such rich fodder for storytelling.

Trower adeptly authenticates these “types” through dialogue that
records faithfully every epithet and curse flung up and down the coast;
yet he falls just short of producing a character that complies with his
own sense of “the larger-than-life dimension.” Nor does he develop
to their full potential the backwoods motifs of naming or mythmaking,
though he makes reference to both. Instead, the novel’s main action
divides itself between the gritty realism of Terry’s camp life and the
romance of a love triangle he becomes naively ensnared in. Indeed,
Trower turns this tryst into the greatest hazard of the logging camp,
where it evolves into something more monstrous than romantic, and
eventually plays itself out in high drama against a repressed, lunatic
logger and the wronged gentleman husband of the desired femme fatale.
Nevertheless, if the plot is rather conventional, the closing act of
wilderness justice leaves precisely the lingering sense of the bizarre
so characteristic of the “back-of-beyond.”