What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

May 24, 2010
Book # 82

Letter:

Dear Prime Minister Harper:

As everyone on the planet probably knows by now, Yann Martel is busy touring with his new book, and has asked other writers to take over in his absence. Today it is my pleasant duty to present you, and readers of his website, with a classic of Canadian writing, John Steffler’s The Grey Islands.

When I say “classic”, I am placing it among other masterpieces of environmental writing like Thoreau’s Walden, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild; it is a book that engages wilderness in an intense way that alters our way of perceiving it. Unlike those texts, The Grey Islands is, technically, fiction, but it is based on John Steffler’s actual experience alone on the uninhabited Grey Islands off the coast of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. It contains some of the most vivid, and varied, writing anywhere, including prose narrative, lyric poetry (which frequently registers aspects of the place in acute close-up), tall tale, ghost story, dream sequences, essay, maps, census charts, and songs. What emerges is an unforgettable evocation of this remote windswept island and a record of one man’s difficult passage into wilderness. But along with this, there’s an increasing focus on the former residents of the island and the fishermen who still visit it, the narrative opening itself to include their voices in the many-threaded weave.

I’d be hard pressed to say whether I love this book more for its central story (the progress of the protagonist from town planner to pilgrim) or for its wonderful nooks and crannies. There is such economy in the language, and such a sure musical sense in Steffler’s ear, that each of the passages—whether in the voice of a Newfoundland fisherman or the narrator-as-poet—hums with its own energy. When I first read it, back in the eighties, I found it hard to believe he was really pulling it off, making a book so various, with such diverse parts, yet working as an organic whole. It still seems unlikely, as unlikely as confederation, another structure whose mysterious strength—as Canadians discover over and over—lies in its diversity.

I realize that this gift may be redundant—John Steffler having been the Parliamentary Poet Laureate a few years ago. (If you already have a copy, perhaps you wouldn’t mind passing this one along to another parliamentarian.) The Grey Islands should be as inescapable for Canadians as Walden is for those south of the border, an iconic book that sets dramatically before us, in a way that is richly complex, at once meditative and entertaining, the difficult and essential encounter with wilderness.

As a bonus, I’m also including the talking book version, published by Janet Russell of Rattling Books, the intrepid Newfoundland publisher of such distinguished books as Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot and Michael Crummey’s Hard Light—two more books that should be included in any Canadian’s reading repertoire. On the CD, narrated by John Steffler himself, you will also hear Frank Holden speaking the part of Carm Denny, a deceased resident of the island, thought to be mad. It’s a passage not to be missed, and includes the greatest bath scene anywhere. Eat your heart out, Hollywood. My thought is that, what with what I’m sure is a very tight schedule, the CD might squeeze in now, and the book be reserved for a time of greater leisure.

Strong writing enables us to live imaginatively as well as practically; it enlarges the scope of life. When it engages the theme of wilderness, it can also enhance our understanding of ourselves as citizens of the world, as well as of a country. Of course such understanding will embrace not only our hardihood and courage, but our disgraceful blindness to the value of wilderness in and for itself. While that blindness was certainly part of the colonial experience, it remains a lamentable feature of some current attitudes, attitudes often registered in government policy. In the end, reading books like The Grey Islands can help make us better, more thoughtful, inhabitants of the planet.

I hope you will find this a stimulating addition to what must by now be a pretty fascinating, and eclectic, library.

Yours sincerely,

Don McKay

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