Smallwood's Colony
Colony is about Newfoundland as much as anything else. The descriptions of the Rock, the weather, St. John's, the salt cod, and the people of Newfoundland make the island itself seem like a sort of paternal figure to all the other characters.
In the shadow of the island we meet Joe Smallwood, a runt of a man who harbours huge ambitions but no means to achieve them. He seems at times--like during his walk across the island to unionize railway sectionmen--to survive on will alone. But Johnston's Smallwood knows he's an unlikely hero, and that's part of what makes him likable. But Smallwood alone can't carry the novel. So Johnston give us Sheilagh Fielding, his one-time school friend and life-long foil in journalism, socialism and politics.
If Smallwood's ambition is the spine of the story, then the unfulfilled and stormy love between Smallwood and Fielding is the heart. In addition to being part of Smallwood's narrative, Fielding's voice appears throughout the book in excerpts from her journals, her newspaper columns and her history of Newfoundland. I loved the counterpoint between the sardonic, hyper-irony of her columns and History, and the unmoistened honesty of her journals. Like so many of us, Fielding cloaks her pain and loneliness with cleverness, cynicism and disengagement.
Two excerpts then. This paragraph is from their first parting, when Smallwood announces he's leaving for New York and Fielding's cloak drops for a moment:
"You're going for certain?" she said. "You didn't tell me you were thinking about it." I shrugged. So that was it, I thought, flattered. She was sad that I was leaving. I felt a pleasant hurt of fondness for her in my throat. It surprised me. That fleeting look of tenderness was in her eyes, that wistfulness I had seen the day we met at Bishop Feild. It was as if, for an instant, she had stepped outside her life and was seeing everyone in it from a perspective that in a few moments, she would be unable to recall. I wondered how in those few moments she regarded me. And I wondered if this feeling I had for her, this curious affection, might be love.
And then this sentence from Fielding's journal:
But how it was before what happened between us, how it felt before we met, we can no more recall than we can how we felt when we were born.
(There is another good part--an awkward moment after one of their many arguments where Smallwood wants to hold Fielding but realizes that he's no longer entitled--that I couldn't find.)
Right, well, it's a good read if you have the chance.
