Alexander Maitland Stephen

This book of poetry by A. M. Stephen is a curious mix of modern and Victorian. To be sure, there are abundant poems of archaic-sounding verse that are truly dreadful, especially those inspired by Theosophy or Christian religion. Romantic poems tend to be weak as well. The last quarter of the book is titled 'Flames from the Dust .' These poems are not as strong as the first part. Here is a list of the poems that I liked:

Prelude
Steel Cliffs
The First Step
While Hearing a Lecture on Oriental Mysticism
One Seed Have I Sown - a little gem
There's a Wild Rose Tangled in the Prarie Wind
The Unpardonable Sin - social justice of debtors
The Green World
Vancouver - a highlight as I live in Vancouver
A Pharisee?
The Earth is Ours - it's hard to know if this is serious or in jest
On the Air
Mountains
That Which a Man Bequeaths
The Children are Dreaming
Villanelle… (meer)

This is an odd novel. The protagonist, Craig Maitland, is a young newspaper reporter in Vancouver, British Columbia. He journeys north around 1905 to the Squamish Valley to soothe his nerves from the city's pace. While there, he stays at a crude hotel run by a giant named Bud Power, repeatedly described as simian. Craig meets and falls in love with a young married woman named Jocelyn Page. While in Squamish, he has an epiphany that he will devote his life to the labour movement. He returns to Vancouver and soon thereafter breaks off the romance with Jocelyn as he cannot abide by a love triangle.

Maitland sets to work on The Beacon, a labour newspaper run by an older man named Tacey. Eventually, Craig meets and falls in love and marries a beautiful woman named Stella Shannon. They are happy together, but Stella has an undisclosed medical condition that somehow results in her death. There is some excitement over a worker's strike machinated by Bud Powers, a secret government spy. Craig sets out to reveal Powers' evil intentions but is overawed by Powers' great strentgth. The strike finishes, many of the ringleaders plead guilty, and the newspaper office is trashed. Craig chooses to travel to the South Seas with an acquaintance, Captain Hardy, to document the Captain's apparent discovery of Atlantis. Captain Hardy and another friend, the Laird, arrange for the recently widowed Jocelyn Paget to book passage on the voyage.

What I enjoyed most about the novel was the unusual setting within the labour movement. I suspect that, to some extent, the novel is semi-autobiographical, at least in broad outline. Somewhat offputting was the descriptive prose passages, especially of nature, as I am from Vancouver, and many of the descriptions of sunsets and other weather effects rang untrue. Despite having strong women characters, some passages were painfully sexist - even though A. M. Stephen was remarkably progressive for his time. Overall, I thought it ranks fairly well for early British Columbia novels. It is at least distinctive and stands on its own.… (meer)