Monkey Beach

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

This first novel by a First Nations woman writer was nominated for both
the 2000 Giller Prize and the 2000 Governor General’s Award.
Robinson’s story collection Trapline won the Winifred Holtby Prize for
the best work of Commonwealth fiction.

I found Monkey Beach overly long, a candidate for better editing. It
is, however, a powerful portrait of a Haisla community on the north
shore of British Columbia’s Kitimat region. Lengthy it may be, with a
meandering plotline and a tentative sense of direction, but Robinson has
a strong ability to portray the angst of a generation of teens in this
northern community. Most members of the adolescent group to which the
narrator belongs are addicted to drugs and alcohol—most, but not quite
all. Some have shaken free of addiction and found their direction by the
novel’s end. The narrator is only 11 when the novel begins, and around
17 at the end, when she gives her frayed teddy bear to a friend who is
moving to Vancouver: “He gives good hugs.” Their emotional
vulnerability is well portrayed.

The novel’s strength lies in its realistic portrayal of the Haisla
community and its inherited way of life, one being continually adapted.
There are also dramatic scenes of storms and rescues at sea. Robinson
has yet to master form, the novel’s core element, but she has made an
impressive start.