And All the Rest: Stories
The combination of dramatic setting and narrative skill that makes for a compelling tale is best exemplified in the books of Roderick Haig-Brown and Farley Mowat. These writers stand far above their Canadian contemporaries and rank high internationally.
Both Haig-Brown and Mowat have come to the writing of outdoor books almost inevitably. Confirmed naturalists who have given years of their lives to exploring the Canadian wilderness, active and dogged campaigners for conservation, they have a feeling for the Canadian land and a knowledge of it that are genuine and deep. More important, they are thoroughly professional writers who have learned how to shape their feelings rather than just express them; they know that even in children's stories a character remains vivid long after the most ingenious contrivances of plot have been forgotten. (pp. 164-65)
Farley Mowat's stories are somewhat more conventionally adventurous and less thoroughly realistic than Haig-Brown's. Lost in the Barrens … recounts the experiences of a white boy, Jamie, and an Indian boy, Awasin, who become separated from the Indian band. They encounter every test the North can impose upon them. They suffer near-starvation and snow blindness. They fight to the death with a Barren Lands grizzly and with almost unbearable suspense they miss by a hair's breadth the Indian band they were supposed to join for the return. Somehow they survive it all and grow up in the process.
Mowat's strength lies in the sense of pace and breathless suspense he gives to his tale. The boys almost reel from crisis to crisis. But Mowat is far too good a writer, and he knows the North too well, to strain credibility in the interest of narrative. Beneath the overlay of adventure there is always the solid substance of the North itself and the kind of character development it imposes on those who live there. Awasin, the son of a Cree chieftain, explains to Jamie, the city boy, that one must conform to the North rather than fight it, and so the interest of the story is fundamentally based on the way that adaptation is made rather than on the events that precipitate it.
Mowat's steady hand on the world of reality can be seen even more clearly in his modern pirate story, The Black Joke…. Here are the hard economic facts of life in the Newfoundland outports in the 1930s. The power of the traders, the father's need to find a profitable cargo so as to retain his ship, form a springboard for the incidents. The Black Joke is also a first-class tale of the sea in the grand, a-little-larger-than-life tradition: seafaring boys navigating in stormy waters, brave seamen and scheming merchants, rum-runners and castaways, a fine schooner shipwrecked and seized but brought home safely to port. Mowat's beautifully outrageous imagination is shown particularly in the gusto with which he delineates character. His villains are properly evil. There is even a touch of grandeur about Captain Smith: 'Back to the ship,' he bellowed, 'or I'll drill the rotten lot of you'—an imprecation in the best tradition of pirates' curses. Yet all this is set against a background of precise detail, whether Mowat is describing a Newfoundland outport or catching a salmon or sailing a ship through the fog. The humour in the story is not particularly subtle, though perhaps it is well calculated for its audience. The two young heroes, Peter and Kye, who are capable of doing a man's job in sailing the Black Joke, indulge in pranks dear to their age—squirting bilgewater at the unpleasant trader, Mr Barnes, and frying salt pork when he is seasick. The style, as in Lost in the Barrens, is simple, exact, and detailed, in the tradition of the plain English of [Daniel] Defoe and [Jonathan] Swift. (pp. 167-69)
[Plain] words are often the prelude to momentous events. 'It was a magnificent night,' says Mowat quietly, and then launches into the crescendo of the story in which the boys cause an explosion on the Black Joke and rout the villains. These pages are probably the most exciting in Canadian children's literature. The Black Joke is a latter-day Treasure Island, a story whose gusto and toughness are generally lacking in Canadian books for children.
Mowat and Haig-Brown owe most of their success to their respect for their craft and for their readers. There is no sense of writing down—they write on equal terms with their readers, like Stevenson, and, most important, they have a lot to say to them. (p. 169)
Sheila Egoff, "And All the Rest: Stories," in her The Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children's Literature in English (© Oxford University Press, Canadian Branch, 1975; reprinted by permission), Oxford University Press, Canadian Branch, 1975, pp. 161-206.∗
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