Book Reviews

Childhood's Journey

Philip Roy (Author)
Journey to Atlantis. Ronsdale Press
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L. M. Montgomery (Author) and Benjamin Lefebvre (Editor)
The Blythes Are Quoted. Penguin Books
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Reviewed by Gisèle M. Baxter

The best writers (both for young readers and about youth) understand what a crucial place play-acting has in the development of imagination, and how much it depends on a flexible combination of storytelling and observation. The adventure story both situates the reader in a world familiar from imaginative exploration, and introduces fresh venues for new games. Philip Roy's confident, refreshing Journey to Atlantis avoids the tendency now to write such stories as complicated grand narratives set in magical secondary worlds, and provides a lean, linear, episodic tale that doesn't really require familiarity with its prequel, The Submarine Outlaw. The setting, or base camp, for its adventure is the relative isolation and sea-proximity of a Newfoundland fishing village. The premise is straightforward and compelling: young Alfred pilots a homemade submarine, maintained with the assistance of kindly strongman Ziegfried; the other characters in his life are his crew (a dog and a seagull), his fisherman grandfather, and an eccentric herbalist and seer named Sheba who lives by herself on a nearby island and encourages Alfred in his explorations. Once the premise is established, the story proceeds through a series of brief adventures, which confront Alfred with various decisions, and bring him to strange places and to meetings with strange characters, echoing the myths and legends that inform this book as much as its knowledge of seafaring and sea lore. However, Alfred also visits recognizable places, and meets people there, and there is just enough vivid, precisely chosen visual detail to bring these places to life, while reminding readers "that it was the interesting places that made you travel somewhere, but the people that made you go back." Like Treasure Island's Jim, Alfred is fifteen, old enough to pursue his quest plausibly, young enough to retain a sense of wonder. While his story may lack the vigour and grandeur of the more ambitious secondary-world fantasy (despite its fantasy elements), it has an odd credibility about it, and appealing characters: as for whether it is a "boys' book," it seems more a mostly male world that doesn't preclude female participation or readership.

L.M. Montgomery sometimes brings to mind Katherine Mansfield in her ability to depict the complex politics of children's playacting, and while her name is indelibly associated with her first and most famous book, Anne of Green Gables, she was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays, poetry, letters, and journals. Because of the literary reputation of Anne, Montgomery is often regarded as a children's writer, and yet her ambitions were far less specifically focused. She wrote a number of immediate sequels to her first novel, and almost twenty years later, produced novels filling in the gaps. Scholars have often looked at the autobiographical elements of Montgomery's work; Anne in some ways seems to have been Maud's alter ego: the awkward, unhappy duckling who emerges as a slightly eccentric but undeniably glamorous swan, and leads a happy life as a wife and mother, emotionally and intellectually fulfilled. And yet the huge body of contextual material collected in two volumes of Chronicles of Avonlea implicates both the wider world and the dark undercurrents of this idyllic romance. Through non-Blythe characters, the stories hint at (and sometimes detail) thwarted passion, abusive marriages, suicide, madness and despair, postponed happiness, poverty, and cruelty. This is balanced by so much humour and the same vivid sense of place characteristic of the Anne books that for most readers, the general perception of Montgomery's work remains intact. The Blythes are Quoted, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, gathers together a series of short stories, similar in style to the Chronicles though often less lush and more confident in tone, some experimental vignettes concerning the Blythe family both circa the First World War and pending the Second, and some poems attributed to Anne (who found in adolescence an outlet for her wild imagination in writing) and Walter, the poet and war casualty of the Blythe sons: evidence that Anne's world continued to intrigue Montgomery, also evidence of her awareness of and interest in developments in Canadian literature. The word "darkness" frequently emerges in mention of this book, and it is melancholy and elegiac in tone (though with a considerable amount of the old wittiness in the stories and in the comments of the Blythes' long-standing housekeeper Susan), but to devotees of Montgomery's novels, these tones are not so much departures as developments, occasionally reflecting on and echoing the early world of children at play, and Montgomery always knew, as J.M. Barrie did, that there is an elegiac quality in childhood play, a realization that the Neverland can never be permanently inhabited, but that its echoes might be maintained in works of the imagination, as diverse as Walter Blythe's poetry, and for that matter, Journey to Atlantis.

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This review has not yet appeared in Canadian Literature.

MLA: Baxter, Gisèle M.. Childhood's Journey. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, n.d. Web. 2 Sept. 2010.

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