eart of the rainfor

GROGAN ’S CAFE. Peter Trower. Harbour Publishing. $16.95

J RITERS OF both fiction and history tend to get lost
in the B.C. woods and fall under the spell of the
Paul Bunyan myth: the ‘larger than life loggers’

romance of the big trees.

Even in his earliest bunkhouse
ballads, poet Peter Trower was al-
ready sounding a different note;
not so much debunking the myth
as humanizing it by exposing its
“large as life and twice as nasty”
side.

Over three decades, his poetry
has evolved from neo-deggeret
derived from “the two Bobs”
(Service & Swanson), to a
thoroughly contemporary poetics
without the blessings of academic
appreciation or a teaching
sinecure. ;

That and the relentless honesty
of his work has made him a
unique cross-over writer in Cana-
dian literature, a seminal figure in
the “work poetry” movement.

Respected elder and mentor to
younger “‘street poets” like
Evelyn Lau, he’s equally comforta-
ble reading to an audience of
literati at the Railway Club or off
the back of a truck to gatherings of
Joggers in Squamish or Port Alber-
ni.

Now in his 60s, with eight books
of poems behind him and more in
the works, having collaborated
with Ellen Frith on a history of Port
Mellon (Rough and Ready Times),
and at work on a history of the
B.C. fur trade with longtime friend
Yvonne Klan, he’s turned his
ever-restless hand to fiction.

Grogan’s Cafe, the first instali-
ment of a proposed trilogy, is a
classically modelled tale of a
young man’s coming-of-age that
resonates with echoes of Jack
London and Joseph Conrad.

Child of a runaway mother and
an alcoholic newspaperman, or-
phaned Terry Belshaw follows his
brother Cnes into the wild world
of the “gyppo” logging raft-
camps that pocked the iniets of
this coast like smallpox scars in the:
1950s.

It is a world Trower knows like ;

an ex-spouse; he was married to it:
for more than 20 years.

But to Terry, it is a world where ':
nothing is what it seems ina ;
young man’s dreams. "

Legendary loggers turn out to be
loudmouthed louts; the raft-camp |
refuges for the full range socio-- |:
and psychopathic men who stay
out of of prison only by hiding out
in marginal professions ike the
merchant marine or logging,
where competence is the only re-
quirement and nobody heard of a
sanity test.

As Conrad saw the vast empty.
seas and the interior of ‘darkest:
Africa’ as moral stages for man in
extremis, so Trower sees the
primeval West Coast rainforest: a

Native artwork:
decorates wails

From page 27

blueberries.

We were welcomed warmly and
served promptly at the Gathering
Place.

The small cafe, decorated with
native art, is another example of
Burrard Band Chief Leonard ¢
George’s enlightened quest to
establish viable businesses on his
band’s land so that his peoplé can

take charge of their lives and their
futures.

It's an important cultural outpost
at which native and non-native
cultures can meet and mingle.

A gathering place worth =|
patronizing for slaying appetites
and dispatching long-held misun-
derstandings.

John Moore
BOOK REVIEW

sawdust- and moss-floored arena
in which all that is best and worst
in men is ruthlessiy exposed.

in this green Purgatory, Terry is
tested and initially found wanting.

Condemned for his forbidden
love for the sensuaus wife of a
faller who has befrienced him and
his cowardice in the face of a

Ss

sadistic crewboss, he pets a
foretaste of Heil as a short-order
cook at Grogan’s Cafe, a
decidedly bizarre bistro on the
bottle-strewn bay at the squalid
loggers’ terminus of Minstrel
Island.

Only later, when he returns to
the woods and reclaims his
manhood in a camp run by Big
Fanny Angleworth (a character
based on a number of unsung
women loggers), does Terry come
to understand the often ironic and
real meaning of courage and
cowardice, love and betrayal.

While all this Conradian arm-
wrestling between good and evil is
going on, a humorous undertow
constantly threatens to pull the
pilings out from under the whole
shebang.

Full of hilarious scenes and neat
plot twists that provide a compas-
sionate leavening of humor to
balance the moral bleakness of
love, revenge and innocence lost,
Grogan’s Cafe is a helluva first
novel that will whet your appetite
for the next two installments.

Get at it, Trower.

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