Antigonish Review
#123
Duane Leroy Vorhees
A Maritime Argosy
Briefly A Candle by Vernon Mooers
(Fundy Production Associates, 1999).
In this kaleidoscopic picaresque first-person first novel, Vernon Mooers
traces the early life, loves, and misadventures of one Jason McMullin
of Fredericton, New Brunswick. Jason, like his Gram, is "a walking
history book and has an impeccable memory for details and events going
almost back to when [he] was born.... There are people, relatives whose
names I haven't heard before, events that interconnect in [his] mind,
which I can't make sense of or keep straight from one excursion over north
to the next." But gradually a few of the shifting cast of characters
establish themselves as important members of the unfolding drama.
The most prominent of these characters is Eddie McKay. Our first extensive
introduction to Eddie occurs in a scene that sets the mood for much of
the first half of the book, and for its finale. The two companions have
taken out the raft they have found and hidden and are looking for muskrat
traps and fishing nets to plunder. "Ma-ark Twain... De-eep Water,"
Eddie sings out. And it is in the guise of a maritime Huck Finn that he
usually appears. In most of the ways that matter to the boys in the novel,
Fast Eddie is the top dog, a Five-Star swimmer in Y competitions while
Jason is still a novice Third Star; a musician in a local band, a good
hockey and pool player, a pretty good fisherman, pretty good at everything
- a cat with nine lives. "He knows a lot of people everywhere."
But instead of the vast Mississippi river, or the wine-dark Mediterranean
that the earlier Jason, of Argos fame, had sailed, the setting here is
the small lakes and streams of eastern Canada. Indeed, many of the book's
prose glories are its evocative descriptions of these places and the small
towns they shape. (Even the object of the hero's doomed love affair is
named Janie Brooks.) It is an environment that limits the horizon, stunts
the prospects of the ones restlessly growing up there. Most of the local
family relationships are either brutal or distant, marked by absence of
feeling and drunken excess. Jason's friends, when they are not lifting
someone else's goods, spend their time looking to "skin" a young
girl or get into a brawl. The future is as bleak and uninspiring as the
landscape.
Life for Jason is always on the edge, whether of physical danger or between
the social classes. He is idealistic, romantic, shy, assailed by doubts
and false hopes, a dreamer and introvert, always a step behind his closest
comrade: "You can never beat Fast Eddie. Whether it's fishing or
hunting or anything else, he's always up first and raring to get into
it. I am always later."
But it is the 1960s, after all. "Things are beginning to happen.
Role models come into town, hair to their waists, travelling the country
preaching some kind of new gospel. The ideas from Yorkville and Haight-Ashbury
and Greenwich Village spread outward like ripples on a lake.... This summer
it hits town and devours a whole generation." Under the impetus of
the change that overtakes North American youth, the book's central metaphor
broadens over half the continent, the rafts and the rivers are transformed
into trains and buses and stream-of-consciousness long-distance thumb
rides.
In the new urban, drug-and-sex-centered world Jason embraces, he loses
touch with most of his past, even including Eddie McKay. Haunted by memories
of Janie Brooks, and by the break-up of his own home and his father's
suicide, he sinks ever deeper, ever farther from the predictable routine
of his youth. A bad meth trip nearly does him in. But he is nursed back
to health and gets a new start in life, this time as a photojournalist
in college - he becomes one who "can reduce the significance of an
event to a single frame of action, a precis that contains past, present
and future." A new, more mature, balance is thus achieved.
The action of the novel closes where it begins. Jason and Eddie "borrow"
a green-flat-bottomed boat and go fishing on Mud Lake.
"'It's Moby!' Eddie yells as he plays the fish and it
breaks the surface. It's a big brook trout, probably a good two pounds
on the table. I do the net work and look enviously at his prize."
But, despite the obvious parallels with which Mooers baits the scene,
including Eddie's apt literary foreshadowing, it soon becomes apparent
which of the young men has really come to grips with life. As Jason comments
at the end, "Maybe you never really know anyone at all."
But that is not true of this novel. We readers do come to know Jason
McMullin, intimately and in detail: his hopes, his fears, his triumphs
and defeats; what he does, what he hears, what he thinks, what he remembers.
And in learning to know Jason we come to find a remote part of the world
as well: the adolescent mid-century Maritimes. Perhaps it no longer exists
for any future chronicler: "It's all changed now," Jason laments.
"Maybe it's because when I grow older it looked older too."
But it is still real within the pages of the novel, due to the skill and
grace with which Mooers presents it.
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