The Island Walkers

November 3, 2003
Set in a Canadian mill town in the mid-1960s, this solemn, accomplished first novel charts the fate of mill worker Alf Walker and his family as the town teeters on the brink of great upheaval. In 1965, Bannerman's mills, the largest employer in Attawan, Ontario, are taken over by Intertex, a textile conglomerate with an eye for cost cutting. After the first round of layoffs, a union organizer comes to Attawan, attracting suspicion from both management and workers, many of whom remember the disastrous results of an ill-planned strike in 1949. Alf, reluctant to jeopardize his standing as heir apparent to the foreman's job, is particularly skeptical of the drive to unionize. However, when Alf's desire to please the new management leads to unintended consequences, he begins to reconsider his position. Meanwhile, Alf's son Joe, a studious teenager who plans to go to college, falls for Anna Macrimmon, a worldly new classmate whose father is an accountant at Intertex. At the other end of the social spectrum, Joe's younger brother, Jamie, befriends Billy Boileau, son of a poor half-Indian mother, prompting Jamie's mother, Margaret, to label the Boileaus "not our kind of people," and going so far as to ban the child from her home. Bemrose's rather studied, deliberate prose and self-conscious lyricism slow the pace at first, but as the novel gains momentum, its exploration of class and vivid sense of place give it weight and depth.