I read this book in 2005 when it was first published. I’ve subsequently read the two other books in the trilogy: What They Wanted and The Fortunate Brother. I recommended Donna Morrissey to my book club and suggested we start with Sylvanus Now since it’s the first in the series. And it gave me an opportunity to re-read it. I think a second reading of it only heightened my appreciation.

Sylvanus Now is a fisherman from the Newfoundland outport community of Cooney Arm. He falls in love with Adelaide, a beautiful girl from nearby Ragged Rock. Adelaide wants to escape her stultifying life working the flakes drying cod and helping care for her many siblings. Sylvanus convinces her to marry him, promising her, “’You won’t ever have to touch a fish agin’” (103) and building her a house with no windows facing the flakes or the sea. The two face personal tragedies and the outside world intrudes as they work at building a life together.

Set in the 1950s, this novel is also the story of changes in the Newfoundland fishery. Sylvanus fishes the traditional way, by hand-jigging and drying his catch on flakes, but the traditional fishery is being supplanted by trawlers using gill nets and by giant factory ships. Sylvanus’s method of fishing is very ethical as well; in the first fishing trip described in the novel, he releases a mother-fish full of roe which has not yet spawned: “The ocean’s bounty, she was, and woe to he who desecrated the mother’s womb” (4). His method is contrasted with that of the trawlers, “scraping the bottom, getting the mother-fish and all them not yet spawned” (200). Sylvanus witnesses one of the colossal factory ships wasting thousands of fish when a net splits: “Within minutes Sylvanus’s boat was encompassed by the fish now drifting on their backs, their eyes bulging out of their sockets . . . their stomachs bloating out through their mouths . . . Mother-fish. Thousands of them” (255). Because of foreign freezer ships, “offshore killers,” the fish Sylvanus catches become smaller and eventually he catches fewer and fewer. Sylvanus foresees the collapse of the cod fishery because of what he views as a raping of the sea: “What kind of fool can’t figure we’re farmers, not hunters; that we don’t search out and destroy the spawning grounds, that we waits for the fish to be done with their seeding, and then they comes to us for harvesting” (219)?

This is very much a novel of character. Adelaide and Sylvanus in particular are developed in depth. A reader will feel as if s/he knows these people because they are so realistic. They have flaws and inner conflicts which make them relatable and sympathetic. In some ways, the two are foil characters. For instance, Sylvanus “was poor at book learning” (4); what he loves is his life fishing which gives him “satisfaction” and “fulfilled him” (3). For Adelaide, school is “salvation. For it was there her work was tallied, and her excellence in Latin, calligraphy, and reading raised her to the front of the class” (27). Because he loves the sea, Sylvanus imagines “The sea would be [Adelaide’s] garden” (21), but “She hated the water, hated its stink of brine and rot and jellyfish, and hated how all night long it shifted and moaned like some old crone hagged in sleep. And worse, she hated the briny smell of salt fish” (26). Yet they do share some similarities. For instance, both enjoy being alone, Sylvanus on the sea and Adelaide in her house.

For me, Adelaide is the most relatable. She’s a dreamer with aspirations to be a missionary and not just a woman whose worth is “determined by the white of her sheets flapping on the line” (29). She’s very intelligent and loves school, so being forced to stop her education and work on the flakes is heart-breaking for her; she becomes “a soul forced along another’s wake” (43). Her desire to escape the wretched work on the flakes and at the cannery and the “bathing, diapering, and feeding the babies, and scrubbing, sweeping, and picking up after the toddlers trailing behind her” (24) is understandable. Likewise, her desire to be alone is understandable. She has virtually no time to be alone in peace and quiet. Unfortunately, her wanting to be alone earns her a reputation as being standoffish. When women come to comfort her, she interprets their visits as attempts to snoop and gossip: “so far had she dwelled outside the lives of these neighbours, their goodwill had less effect upon her heart than a tepid kiss upon a wintery cheek” (156).

Fortunately, Adelaide is a dynamic character. Suze gives her a gift which acts as a catalyst for change. Suze also tells her, “’We don’t know half the time what we’re giving others. . . . there’s a comfort knowing others are suffering worse than you right now. Makes you think about them rather than yourself’” (164). And Adelaide listens and acknowledges the wisdom of this warm-hearted, generous woman “whose soul she had shunned because it couldn’t read a prayer book” (162). She realizes her selfishness: “’Perhaps I don’t think of anybody long enough to talk about them. . . . I never done that in my life – go visiting somebody needing company’” (160). The window Sylvanus puts in their house symbolizes Adelaide’s new outlook.

The relationship between the Sylvanus and Adelaide is developed very clearly. Sylvanus’s love for Adelaide is so obvious: everything he does, he does for her. He builds her the type of house he thinks she would like, and he tells her not to worry: “’Strong hands, I’ve got, and a strong mind when it comes to caring for you’” (169). He’s always thinking of things to make her happy and make her life easier: “And it was nice, those gifts he kept bringing her, of snow crab, and scallops bigger than tea plates, and handfuls of last summer mint tea buried beneath the snow, and the paths he kept well shovelled . . . “ (170). Because we are given their perspectives in alternating sections, the reader sees what they think of each other and how misunderstandings arise. During an argument, Adelaide twists away from her husband, “her mouth lined with self-loathing” (176) but Sylvanus interprets her actions differently: “she had pushed him away, staring upon him with loathing” (199). Both leave much unspoken and that causes problems.

The dialogue is perfect because Morrissey has truly captured the Newfoundland dialect. The conversations between Sylvanus and his brothers really need to be read aloud.

This book is highly recommended to readers who like complex characters. It will take a reader on an emotional ride; s/he will feel anger and sadness but, most of all, admiration for the spirit and resiliency of a people faced with harsh realities. And for those who have fallen in love with the Now family, there are two more books chronicling their lives; I think I will re-read both What They Wanted and The Fortunate Brother.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )

Despite this book having, let's face it, a quite dark tone, I really enjoyed it. I read it for a Canadian Lit class at university and I'm really glad I did. Morrissey knows how to create complex and vivid characters as well as settings. I've heard there's a sequel but I have not yet read it. ( )

3.5 stars

It is the 1950s in Newfoundland. Adelaide has grown up taking care of all her younger siblings, but hates hearing them scream and longs for time to herself. Sylvanus becomes a fisherman, but as technology and times change, he clings to the old ways. It is the beginning of the decline of the fisheries.

It started off quite slow and I wasn't sure if I was going to like it. About a third of the way in, I suddenly found it much more interesting. I can't say the pace picked up or anything, but I found myself interested in Addie and Sylvanus and what was happening. The perspective does alternate back and forth between Addie and Sylvanus, but whose perspective it is is marked at the beginning of each part. Overall, I liked it. ( )

I have just read a novel of such unspeakable beauty that I am overwhelmed. Donna Morrissey's Sylvanus Now is breathtaking, right from the first vision of Sylvanus jigging fish: right forearm up, left forearm down, left forearm up, right forearm down; to the vision of Adelaide's eye, sparkling blue. It's a novel about the changing of the fishery in Newfoundland, when large trawlers came in to rape the seas and the governments abandoned both the sea and the careful tenders of her in favour of cheap fish and way too much of it. It's a story of a people forced to change their ways of life, and it seems as fresh now as when it was written, as we all cope with a changing economy and hang on the American election with bated breath, wondering what our future in Canada holds, tied as we are to the tails of the American Bald Eagle (a carrion-eater) and the Chinese Tiger (endangered by environmental change).

Donna Morrissey has won many awards for her writing, and they are well-deserved. Her power in a sentence is vast. Her ability to evoke the feelings of the people she describes, complicated and earthy and thoughtful and hidden as they are is astonishing.

I can't believe I hadn't read her before.

It's funny the reaction I have when reading such writing. I relax into the book, knowing I am in the hands of a master, knowing the book will take me on a ride and enclose me in its world. I stay awake, eyelids flipping up and down like a blind in the hands of a misbehaving preschooler, unwilling to let the world go, reading just that one more page. With lesser books, I stay alert, less involved, easier to distract, more likely to put it down, even if it is a good book. The great books show me their hearts. I can't help but respond.

And the feeling lingers. After Sylvanus Now, I want to go out and see the sea, inhale it, feel its call, see the salt-bleached houses, run the wind through my hair. ( )

Sometimes a book may not have an action packed plot-line, but the words on the page transport the reader into the day-to-day world of the story so eloquently, that one feels as if they have been there. I know what the wind from the point of a tiny town on Newfoundland tastes like. I've heard the crash of the waves, and the sting of the salt as the fish are set to dry. I've lived with the people of that town, through their sorrows, and seen their hopes.

I was fascinated to learn about the coastal fishing life off the Newfoundland coast. I've heard about problems of overfishing etc, but never parlayed it into terms of technology vs tradition. I remember the salted fish, so common in my childhood, that could be seen in the delicatessens of my youth. The coppery color of the skin fascinated me as a child, though the taste didn't win me over. I now realize that I don't see those same salted, dried fish many places, though there seems to be an abundance of frozen or canned fish. I never thought on what that change might have meant to the fishermen who pulled the fish out of the waters. And though I'd heard of jigging, never understood the rhythm of it until this book.

If you're looking for a monumental, fast-paced read, put this book down. If you're looking for a complex mystery, this isn't the book for you. But if you want a glimpse in a time gone by, want to see how modern day life can change a way of life, want to immerse yourself in a world of real people, pick this book up. ( )