Hoping to do some light reading at Folk Fest, I brought Island Falls along with me.
Though I finished it over the course of an afternoon, I was left stunned. Its 122 pages and frequent line breaks make the novel a breezy read, but I would hardly call it “light.” The subject matters it explores are weighty and provoke a great deal of reflection.
I first became aware of author Owen Toews when a mutual follower on X (then known as Twitter) recommended his first book, Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg. Having found it an eye-opening account of racism, land use and class struggle in the city, I was excited for his follow-up effort. Published last year by ARP Books, Island Falls marks a stylistic — but not thematic — shift for the author. The new book is his first novel.
Set in New York, the story centres around an unnamed narrator and his new acquaintance Jan — a Canadian emigrant with “gorgeous red hair” and “piercing incisors.” The narrator takes an immediate and perhaps even romantic fascination in the enigmatic foreigner and his distressing stories about growing up in a town run by a pulp-and-paper company.
The book flits back and forth between a narrative about the writer’s interactions with Jan and transcripts from Jan’s avant-garde essay — or a “report, an anatomy of evil, or something,” the narrator isn’t quite sure which — about life in the titular town.
Many of the details ascribed to the fictional Island Falls will be immediately recognizable to any student of Manitoba history. For example, the mill’s Shantytown Wing — with its lack of in-home electricity or plumbing — clearly evokes Rooster Town, the Métis suburb whose residents were evicted by the City of Winnipeg in 1959. Their homes were burned down to make space for the Grant Park Shopping Centre and Grant Park High School.
Likewise, the North Wing, home to a “forced assimilation camp” and a separate hospital to keep its inhabitants out of the mill’s main facility, reads as an allusion to the Fort Alexander Residential School (in what is now Sagkeeng Anicinabe Nation) and the nearby settler community of Powerview-Pine Falls.
In the 1930s, residents of Pine Falls raised complaints about the presence of Indigenous people in the local hospital, causing the Department of Indian Affairs to build a separate annex in 1938 for the racially segregated Fort Alexander Indian Hospital. As historians Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry uncovered, occupancy at Fort Alexander in 1960 fluctuated between 93 and 128 per cent, while Pine Falls Hospital never exceeded 43 per cent in the five years prior. This produced a situation where “underserviced First Nations people were literally turned away from open beds next door.”
My awareness of this history led me to the initial assumption that Island Falls was a literal stand-in for Pine Falls — the site of the only mill in Manitoba to produce newsprint, as the novel’s mill also does — until Toews included Pine Falls in a list of the fake town’s sister communities.
It was then that I realized Island Falls was not meant to symbolize just a single place. It is a composite. Island Falls could be anywhere in the province.
Rest assured, however, that the novel is not a history lecture. Moments of levity are sprinkled throughout. References to fish fries, curling bonspiels and a “Stoic Reminder Banquet” make the fictional town seem downright charming and quaint.
All of it — the dispossession, the segregation, the recreational activities — is our cultural heritage.
But this makes the story more unsettling, not less. As the narrator points out, these things are inseparable from one another. Is it possible that our joys are always bound up in someone else’s misery — that of a stranger, an exploited labourer or an ancestor? What does this mean for our future? What would a truly decent world even look like?
Overall, the novel’s tone is captured nicely by an early throwaway line. It likely only stood out to me because of my fondness for baseball, but it shaped how I understood the remainder of the text. Jan and the narrator reminisce about I Had a Hammer, the autobiography of star slugger Hank Aaron, which they both read as children. The narrator notes that Aaron’s “God-given ability to wallop a baseball” was “a talent he always felt a melancholy ambivalence about.”
This melancholy ambivalence seeps through the book. Toews’s anger and despair at the social crises he describes are readily apparent to any reader of his first book, but here there is a faint trace of hope and an overwhelming uncertainty.
Toews glances at his own vocation with similar ambivalence. As he mentions in the acknowledgments, the plot details of Island Falls emerged from the author’s postdoctoral research, which involved traveling across Manitoba and “talking to people about life in mill-like places.”
The main characters, meanwhile, are university students in a “small Marxist program.” By the end, Jan burns out of academia. When confronted by a university instructor about the unusual structure of his writing submissions, he responds that “people in my country like inquiries.”
Toews is pointing here to a genuine problem in our politics and education system. It is certainly important to seek historical knowledge, but it is not enough. What good is it to accumulate information about past injustices if not to actively confront them in the present? What would it take for a university course or a public inquiry to produce a tangible improvement in social conditions?
True to form, Island Falls does not answer these questions, which only raises another. Why write this at all? Why format the novel as a winding, experimental metafiction only to fill it with obvious real-life parallels? Couldn’t a run-of-the-mill history book get the same point across?
I don’t know either, but the final page offers a clue. The narrator, after losing contact with Jan, realizes that his strange literary concoctions were an effort “to make sense of what had been done to him and to the people he cared for” and “to make [his experiences] sing to us, the way they sang to him.”
Perhaps all writing is done as an exercise to purge some inner turmoil or to revolt against the cruelty of existence. That’s why Jan wrote his inquiry, I suspect it’s why Toews wrote the book and it’s why I write too.
