THE ISLANDS
By Gerald Brace. G. P Putnam's Sons.
"The Islands" is not another Maine novel of a lost land of brave vessels and old memories, a pious celebration of departed greatness. It is the book of an adopted son who knows Maine as a place of present delight and living beauty. One wants to read it slowly, his senses open to the powerful visualization and sense impression. The texture of emotional background is rich, for life is lived upon a little land between sky and sea. Always the wind is veering and weather making. Man shares air and water with the gulls, though he walks sturdily upon the earth.
Gerald Brace knows the native culture and craft, the variety of skills. He writes with the easy definiteness of one who has touched things with sure and familiar hands. A designer of boats himself, he knows the organic completeness of a hull sheering from lifted bow to stern, the strange rightness of functional forms, final and irreducible.
Although some of his Bostonians are not thoroughly convincing, his natives are sound as oak. Shy, deprecating people they are, dry and salty as a flaked cod in their humour, distinct and independent in their integrity. The cadence of Yankee speech shaped by living and free of abstraction and Latinism brings sound to the printed words. Uncle Mose stands magnificently above them all. A good man with tools, he is chary of words, but when he speaks it is with authority and the wisdom of earned knowledge, "true and plumb."
"The Islands" is a book particularly for those who have worked with tools and boats and the sea, but if you haven't been so fortunate, here is rich discovery. Dartmouth could have been proud to have this novel come from, one of its faculty.
