Saints of Big Harbour

Tom Venetis is a professional journalist and editor in Toronto.

When Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven appeared in 1998, she was immediately
hailed as a Canadian writer to watch. Her stories about life in Cape
Breton were compared to Faulkner’s vision of the American South. In
her follow-up novel Saints of Big Harbour, Coady once more chronicles
the dispirited lives of those trapped in cycles of poverty, drink, and
unemployment in Nova Scotia. But where Coady’s Strange Heaven was
notable for a sparse prose that offered acute insight into her
characters’ inner lives, Saints of Big Harbour seems a decidedly more
unfocused affair. Though her prose retains the sharp crispness of her
earlier work, it now seems to offer less insight into the minds of her
characters.

Part of the problem is that Coady tires to tie too many characters to
the central story, which involves Guy Boucher and his relationship with
Connie Fortune and her friend Pam Cormorant. Guy complains that his life
is “stupid” and “embarrassing” and that “girls are insane and
for the most part [he] can’t stand the thought of them,” which does
not stop him from falling hard for Connie, whom he first sees at a
dance. The problem is that Connie is more interested in a much older but
violent man whose rages add to her mounting depression. Pam does not
understand Connie’s depression and associates her often contradictory
behavior with Guy’s fumbling attempts to get Connie to notice him. Pam
soon thinks that Guy is the one who is beating Connie, a misconception
that leads to the cops’ being called and even a bit of vigilante
justice.

If Coady had focused on exploring the dynamic between Pam, Guy, and
Connie, she would have produced a memorable and insightful novel, which
she clearly is capable of writing. Instead, she clutters her story with
such cartoonlike characters as the drunken Uncle Isadore and his
drinking partner Alison Mason, burying the novel’s moments of true
insight.