Sylvanus Now

Awarded the Thomas Head Raddall Award for adult fiction from the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia, Sylvanus Now is the love story of fisherman Sylvanus Now and his wife Adelaide. Their complicated, hardly idyllic, romance is set against the backdrop of technological changes in the inshore fishery, and the subsequent decline of cod stocks. As in Morrissey's other works, there is a focus on the isolation of the outport community, as well as gothic details that keep it from becoming simply a nostalgic portrait of a Newfoundland prior to industrialization.

Sylvanus comes from a family of fishermen: men who push their luck, men who drown. Despite being stubborn, he is portrayed as a godlike figure, evident even in his name—Silvenus, Roman god of the forest. However, as Morrissey has suggested, he becomes god over the ocean—knowing the currents, the breeding grounds of the fish, how to hand jig a cod. Trawling and sweeping the seafloor with modern equipment is anathema to him. Noble and bowlegged at the same time, he is a larger-than-life character who one day appears on the front doorstep of a woman he spied at a dance. For a moment, she is taken aback by his godliness, then realizes he is wearing rubber boots.

Adelaide aspires to be godlike, but she is brought back to earth by the immanence of her life, which consists mostly of caring for her mother's babies and engaging in manual labour at the local fish flakes, where cod is turned by hand to dry in the sun. However, the fish flakes are later replaced by a new factory which is hailed as a windfall for the small outport; the result, though, is that the inhabitants' manual labour is micromanaged in a factory setting in which their working conditions, rather than being improved, simply involve different hardships. Desperate to escape the drudgery, Adelaide marries Sylvanus even though he is a fisherman from an outport smaller than her own home. Despite their fumbling attempts at birth control, she bears three children who perish. Though she has always rebelled against caring for her mother's children, she becomes depressed when her own die. Her misery deepens as local women try to draw her from her melancholy despite her preference for isolation.

As in Morrissey's first two novels, the main characters are isolated by their emotions, as well as their desire to stay away from other people—Sylvanus prefers to jig from his own boat while Adelaide dislikes socializing and would rather walk alone in natural surroundings. Their desire for isolation is symbolized by the windowless wall that looks down on the other homes in the outport. Grief also isolates Adelaide, though her mother-in-law Eva reaches out to her with her own despair that has lingered since the drowning of her husband and son.

Fertility is another prominent theme in the novel. Sylvanus considers the ocean "Mother" and its bounty is something he longs to protect, evident when he hooks a mother cod and returns it to the water so that it can spawn more cod for tomorrow. Conversely, when the sea is roiling and angry, he calls it the "sea bitch." Adelaide and her mother Florry are both linked to their fertility—Florry because she bears children at a tiring pace, and Adelaide because her children die and she is somewhat barren. Adelaide's ambivalent attitude toward childbearing causes a hatred of her mother's children yet she becomes disappointed when her own perish. Her substitution for nurturing children is nurturing her garden, where she spends much of her time and is joined by Eva. The importance of childbearing seems to reinforce patriarchal constructs of gender, which seems somewhat incongruous with Adelaide's dreams at the beginning of the novel, when she longs for education and something better than married life in an outport.

While Adelaide and Sylvanus try to salvage what remains of their marriage, the outports of Newfoundland undergo a profound change. It is the 1950s and Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood is encouraging the modernization of the province through an industrial revolution. The traditional methods of salting cod on flakes are replaced by more industrial methods of freezing fish in factories. As well, fishers—the term Morrissey opts for in the novel—are encouraged to quit hand jigging in favour of using modern equipment that increases catches yet pillages the seafloor. Outport inhabitants are also being resettled to larger towns, part of a larger movement in the Atlantic Provinces but one that was fiercely resisted by some Newfoundlanders. Sylvanus refuses to accept the changes, which pits him against his brothers, who buy into the necessity of modernization. Not only does Sylvanus struggle to resist the new fishing methods, he battles against the government plan to resettle his family. In this novel, government is depicted as a short-sighted entity that encourages overfishing through the free handing out of gillnets and loans for large boats. While the government's mishandling of the resource has been proven with the cod crisis of the early 1990s, this novel vindicates those like Sylvanus who attempted to save their livelihoods by relying on traditional methods rather than participating in industrialization.

The narrative structure differs from Morrissey's earlier Kit's Law, but is similar to her approach in Downhill Chance, in that Adelaide and Sylvanus both become third-person narrators. The novel begins with Sylvanus's trials for a few chapters, then dives into Adelaide's tribulations, with the only palpable difference being the focus on Adelaide's day in the garden or on Sylvanus's day on the water. As a result, the restricted narration does not provide any intimate access to the motivations of the characters, as does the first-person narration of Kit Pitman in Kit's Law, which is more lyrical and poetic despite Kit's age. As in previous works, Morrissey's narrative and dialogue capture the rich rhythms and phrases of the province—e.g. as she depicts Sylvanus’s thoughts: “If I gets the morning's catch gutted and split and sitting in brine, and a good scoff of Mother's cooking filling me gut, I just might.”

The novel's outport setting arises from Morrissey's own beginnings in an outport called The Beaches. The isolation of a limited number of families relying on a natural resource such as the fisheries predominates in her work, as she documents the harshness of the fishing industry in Newfoundland—and, ironically, the further hardships caused by its demise.