The Island Walkers: A Novel [Hardcover]

John Bemrose (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 12, 2004

A powerful first novel about a family that slips from fortune’s favor and a town broken by the forces of modernity

Across a bend of Ontario’s Attawan River lies the Island, a working-class neighborhood of whitewashed houses and vine-freighted fences, black willows and decaying sheds. Here, for generations, the Walkers have lived among the other mill workers.

The family’s troubles begin in the summer of 1965, when a union organizer comes to town and Alf Walker is forced to choose between loyalty to his friends at the mill and advancement up the company ranks. Alf’s worries are aggravated by his wife, Margaret, who has never reconciled her middle-class English upbringing to her blue-collar reality. As the summer passes, Joe, their son, is also forced to reckon with his family’s standing when he falls headlong for a beautiful newcomer on a bridge—a girl far beyond him, with greater experience and broader horizons. As the threat of mill closures looms, the Walkers grapple with their personal crises, just as the rest of the town fights to protect its way of life amid the risks of unionization and the harsh demands of corporate power.

Superbly crafted and deeply moving, this remarkable debut follows the Walkers to the very bottom of their night only to confirm, in the end, life’s ultimate hopefulness. The Island Walkers is at once a love letter to a place, a gripping family saga, and a testimony to the emergence of an important new novelist.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in a Canadian mill town in the mid-1960s, this solemn, accomplished first novel charts the fate of mill worker Alf Walker and his family as the town teeters on the brink of great upheaval. In 1965, Bannerman's mills, the largest employer in Attawan, Ontario, are taken over by Intertex, a textile conglomerate with an eye for cost cutting. After the first round of layoffs, a union organizer comes to Attawan, attracting suspicion from both management and workers, many of whom remember the disastrous results of an ill-planned strike in 1949. Alf, reluctant to jeopardize his standing as heir apparent to the foreman's job, is particularly skeptical of the drive to unionize. However, when Alf's desire to please the new management leads to unintended consequences, he begins to reconsider his position. Meanwhile, Alf's son Joe, a studious teenager who plans to go to college, falls for Anna Macrimmon, a worldly new classmate whose father is an accountant at Intertex. At the other end of the social spectrum, Joe's younger brother, Jamie, befriends Billy Boileau, son of a poor half-Indian mother, prompting Jamie's mother, Margaret, to label the Boileaus "not our kind of people," and going so far as to ban the child from her home. Bemrose's rather studied, deliberate prose and self-conscious lyricism slow the pace at first, but as the novel gains momentum, its exploration of class and vivid sense of place give it weight and depth.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The Walker family lives in the Island, a small neighborhood of working-class homes along a bend in the Attawan River of Ontario. Like the Island's other residents, Alf Walker has worked at the Bannerman's textile mill since he returned from World War II with his English wife, Margaret. Bannerman's seems like a fortress for the Island, unchanging and implacable, until the news comes that a Quebec-based firm has purchased the mill. Firings quickly follow, a union organizer arrives, and the remaining workers scramble to choose sides in a bid to keep their livelihoods. For Alf's sensitive son Joe, who is working toward a college scholarship, change comes to the Island in the shape of the beautiful and enigmatic Anna, a troubled girl far beyond her classmates in both imagination and experience. Bemrose writes with quiet power, unflinchingly depicting the painful aftershocks that occur when the forces of modernity collide with the forces of custom. This is an astonishing debut, a big and breathtaking family novel that is both understated and passionate. Meredith Parets
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1St Edition edition (January 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805074112
• ISBN-13: 978-0805074116
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,190,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Moved By A Heartfelt World, January 27, 2006

By 

Robert Gibson (Takoma Park, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Island Walkers : A Novel (Hardcover)

I savored this story, rich and riveting and bursting with compelling characters. John Bemrose pours so much into this story, too much, perhaps, but I did not complain while reading. It was one of those books I really regretted coming to an end.

He tracks the lives of a dozen or more characters. Too many to really do justice to them all, and it is hard to disagree with critics who fault the story on this count. But all are so worthy of exploration that I cannot say who should go. Similarly, the gorgeous writing at times slowed the flow (there is quite a lot of good tension and narrative suspense to keep one turning the pages), but I enjoyed almost all of it. If anything I wish he'd expanded the stories of at least a half-dozen characters.

The first tragedy to strike Jamie I could have done without; so many fiction writers have woven this in to their stories that it's almost hackneyed. This unique story did not need it.

The ending felt a bit rushed, in contrast to the slower build-up to smaller critical events earlier. But I simply wished the story would not end, so no conclusion could leave me feeling that all had been told, that it was 'enough'.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable, August 13, 2006

By 

Wendy Schroeder (Englewood, Co United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Island Walkers : A Novel (Hardcover)

It's 464 pages and I read it in less than a week so as you can guess, I really got into it. Alf Walker works at a Canadian textile mill in the mid-'60s . A company (Intertex) brought the place, called Bannermen's Mills. Alf tried to bring the union in there in 1949 with disastrous results. He has ambivalent feelings about the union trying again to come in.

Most of the book is about this but also about his family. His son Joe wants to go to college and is in love with a girl (Anne) who is into poetry. In his mind, she is better than him. Anne is with Brad so she asked Joe to ask her friend Liz out so they can double date. It gets complicated in a high school kind of way. There is also his wife Margaret, his son Jamie who is 8, and his 10 year old daughter Penny.

I think the union story grabbed my attention since I worked at a factory in Detroit when the Teamsters hustled their way in. We too had to vote yes or no to letting them in. Well, I ended up being in Teamster's local 299, Jimmy Hoffa's old union. I still have the card. Being a union member has it's good and bad points. The process of the union coming in was an interesting time, I'll say that.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great read, February 17, 2004

By 

Jerry Larocque (Fergus, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Island Walkers (Hardcover)

Attawan,a knitting mill town, is the setting for this wonderful book. Follow the trials and tribulations of the Walker family, each member lovable, but dysfunctional as a family. Individual secrets and lack of communication saboutage the family who must also deal with management/union problems taking place at the local knitting mill. Tragedy helps to bring back stability and hope to the family.