The rural in fiction: The Channel Shore

As many of you know, my studies concentrate on rural areas, especially in Nova Scotia. I am interested in how rural areas can be ecologically, socially, and economically resilient. Currently, I am working on a project on rural youth outmigration. These are all topics I am passionate about.

As a side project, this summer I am reading some books that have similar themes as my research. I am interested in seeing how these same issues that I read about in academic journals are presented in fiction. Plus, I love to read, and I love Canadian literature! Two of my favourite books with these sorts of themes are The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler and No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod. I would like to write a blog post on those books but I have not read them in a while.

Recently, though, I finished Charles Bruce's novel The Channel Shore. It was the only novel he wrote, as he was a poet and journalist primarily. Charles Tory Bruce was born in Port Shoreham, Nova Scotia. Yes, I had to look it up too! It is near Guysborough. I thought it was appropriate to read this book because I ended up going to that area of the province last weekend for the Stan Rogers Folk Festival. Both Stan Rogers and Charles Bruce created art about that shore. My first time there was a couple of years ago when I had a job interview in Guysborough. Obviously, I did not get the job. This time when I went to that shore, it rained for three days straight, and was windy and foggy. On the fourth day the sun appeared. Then we left.

The road to Canso

I do not want to give away the main plot points in novel, in case you wish to read it, but I can say it is about three families: The Gordons, the McKees, and the Marshalls. It is the story of generations of these families, from the early 20th century to just after the Second World War. They are fishing families or farming families, Catholic or Protestant, but they all make their home on the Channel Shore. Bruce describe's his Channel Shore as anywhere on that channel between Cape Breton and Mainland Nova Scotia. The place names in the book are fictional.

Guysborough waterfront

I am not a book critic or literary theorist or anyone remotely qualified to analyse novels at all. I was an English major for all of two months in university before switching to what I thought at the time was a more objective major, economics. But, this is the information age, guys! Anyone can publish anything they like on the internet. Woo hoo! So, here goes, my observations on this book.

• Gender-wise, this novel was about men, centred on men, and women for the most part were secondary characters, mainly victims of men's choices, or, in the case of Grant and Hazel, maidens whose rescuing was less about them and more about the atonement or whatever of the man rescuing. I loved the book, but it can be exhausting as a woman to never be able to see oneself in literature, and to always be 'the other.' You know women are always imagining ourselves as men because we have to. We read Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and all those other books but it is far rarer to see a man reading Pride and Prejudice or Twilight and for him to be putting himself in a woman's shoes.
• The main theme of this book, I think, was the character's realization of being a part of their community. Each main character (except, importantly, Anse) had a moment of clarity when they saw their life as being part of the life of the shore. This interconnectedness and interdependence with people geographically and through time was a focus of the book. It was this feeling of being part of something bigger than oneself that motivated the characters, that allowed them to stay. Below is Margaret's experience of this:

 "Margaret had a picture of young men cutting white pine for two-masters, gathering chips for their cresset fires, shaving staves, bending hoops, shingling roofs, replacing sills, fashioning window-frames, cutting sails, caulking seams, cleaning and salting fish, knitting and mending nets... they had known it all, all the skills. They were dead, and the skills gone on a turning tide. 

And yet, people remembered. And people still lived on the Channel Shore, people with others skills, newer crafts, that somehow were related to and grew from the old. The story of the Shore was the story of a strange fertility. A fertility of flesh and blood that sent its seed blowing across continents of space on the winds of time, and yet was rooted here in home soil, renewed and re-renewed.

The thought turned. All these people had faced circumstance, had known love, anger, compassion. Some of them had faced frustration as hard to bear as that which faced herself and Alan. The sense of time and home and people could do nothing to ease the sharpness of that private hunger. But there was something, a feeling strange to Margaret, a feeling almost of companionship..."

•  In the book, we also read about the precarious social relations in the rural community, and how the people in the community carefully keep up the equilibrium. Catholics and Protestants do not mix more than necessary; when a secret threatens one of their own, they keep the secret for decades. 
• I am not sure what to make of the staying/leaving and the representation of the urban in this book. When Anna goes to the city, she violently dies in a random act when a streetcar runs over her. That seems like a thoroughly unambiguous representation of urban as evil and dangerous. But others go away with no real consequences: Bill Graham, for example, lives primarily in Toronto, with only brief visits to the Channel Shore. Others go to Europe to fight in the wars. At the end of the book, the narrator writes about Bill Graham, who has spent the least time on the Shore of any of the characters:"He had also the knowledge that in blood and spirit this was the country he belonged to. He would never live on the Channel Shore. But it was home." 
• So I do think this novel is mainly about belonging. Anse chooses not to belong. Alan and Grant choose to belong. Even Bill Graham, who, like Anse, spends most of his time away from The Channel Shore, chooses to belong. In Bruce's created world, belonging does not depend on family, on religion, or even on whether you leave the shore or stay. It depends on the mutual respect and love you have for your neighbours.

As I was finishing this book, I came across a video on the internet about a documentary that BBC Scotland just released. It is a documentary about The Hector, a ship that carried nearly 200 Scots to Nova Scotia in 1773. I only watched a brief clip of the documentary, as the whole thing is not available in Canada, but I was struck by the description of the ship, which was meant to be a cargo ship but housed these people in their long voyage across the Atlantic, to their new life. I had been to the replica of the ship. but looking back on it now, it shocks me how many people fit down there. It was such a small place.

My great-great-great-great grandfather Andrew Main made that crossing. He brought his wife, Jane Gibson, and his young son Andrew. Jane died sometime during the crossing. After he arrived in Nova Scotia, Andrew Main came to Noel Shore. There he married again (she died), then married again and had children. He built a homestead. He was buried in the cemetery in Noel Shore, and I believe it is the same cemetery where my grandparents are buried, a cemetery just on the edge of the Main land. I lived in Noel Shore until I was about five years old.

Sometimes, when I go to visit my uncle who still lives in Noel Shore, on that same land where Andrew Main settled all those years ago, my dad and my uncle and whoever else is there sit around the big kitchen table and share stories. They have these shared stories, this shared knowledge that I will never know. They talk about places using references only people from the Shore would know. They talk about people in such an intimate way, and have this shared remembrance of the people of the Shore. They know all the same people, they know all the same places. And I know if they ran into anyone who lived in the Shore during their generation they could share that same private knowing, that same bond.

The Noel Shore, as depicted by Kenneth Spearing

I really mourn having lost this. I still have such a deep connection to that Noel Shore that I can barely put into words. I spent only a few years there as a young child, but my ancestors spent over two hundred years there before then. My ancestors made incredibly sacrifices just to come and stay in Noel Shore, Nova Scotia. And yes, it would be remiss of me not to mention that this land was home to the Mi'kmaq people long before my ancestors landed there, and even the Acadian people before them. They were not the first.

This connection to Noel Shore is an enormous part of why I am studying rural places. I know that the people there have made immense sacrifices to be there. They have worked hard. There is a deep connection to place and I do believe that something essential is lost when people are uprooted from this place. I wonder if Charles Bruce wrote The Channel Shore as a way to articulate that feeling: To articulate that though he was cosmpolitan, living in Toronto, working as a poet and a journalist and not a fisher and a farmer, that he was still part of that community. That the Shore never leaves you.