SAILOR GIRL
By Sheree-Lee Olson
Porcupine's Quill,
283 pages, $27.95
Sailor Girl is Globe and Mail Style editor Sheree-Lee Olson's first novel. Set in the early 1980s, it follows naughty and nautical 19-year-old Kate McLeod's final summer as a teen on a craggy Great Lakes grain ship that navigates through Canada's locks and lakes.
Kate takes the job as ship's porter in order to save money for school, as her parents refuse to foot the bill because of her impractical choice of major: photography. On the water, Kate discovers that she is at the mercy of a patriarchal system as antiquated as the leaky ships that threaten the crew's safety. Like many itinerants, Kate uses sex and booze to ease the stress of heavy labour and loneliness.
Sailor Girl's beginning has a revolving door of players: Mean bosses, pockmarked lovers and drunken chefs come and go too rapidly for the reader to care about the characters. Eventually, the ensemble roles are established and Kate is adopted by the senior kitchen staff, May and Hazel, lovable but embittered women who have spent their lives serving mashed potatoes and roast beef to grizzled seamen.
Like the start of the novel, Kate's character is slippery and ever-changing: She appears tough and snarly at turns, but is easily offended or hurt by her crass crewmates. Kate admits that she is a girl with "a reputation," and has been since she was 12. She also makes bad decisions when she drinks. Immediately hooking up with a violent Newfoundlander named Boyd - a man-child who vacillates between screwing her and hitting her - is not one of Kate's best impulse decisions, for example. Though Kate is supposedly savvy, one wonders whether she has ever heard the caveat about not eating yellow snow or dating sailors. As her alcoholic tendencies burgeon, Kate makes several head-smacking errors in judgment.
Olson is skilled at pitching Kate's naiveté and strength, her highs and her lows, and because of this she creates a convincing young central character full of angst and humour - if without self-awareness. Kate herself contains the most interesting journey within the many threads of the novel as her sexual prowess, artistic self and evolving ego alternately flourish and shrink in a male world that does not approve of females on ships - beyond the roles of sexual object or slave.
Olson has a deft poetic style that imprints characters and situations with casual grace and potency. Of the angry and inarticulate Boyd, for example, Kate, observing him at work in the belly of the boat, oiling the machinery, says: "Hell would be like this; hell would be loud. ... Maybe that explained his habitual silence. He had learned to function in a place where words were meaningless."
Olson's writing is confident and revealing, even if the plot, at times, is neither. The add-on scandal at the end of the novel, which swings the narrative focus away from Kate and onto a secondary character, feels inauthentic for a character-driven novel, which has worked hard to create a solid back story around Kate and her trail of choices and conflicts. Despite the distracting ending, Olson has a quality novelist's insight and voice.
Sailor Girl is best in its quieter moments, in its revelations about what it means to be simultaneously a good girl and a bad girl, a smart girl and a stupid girl, on and off the male-dominated deep water. There is a simple joy in observing the rangy and troubled Kate drink and look out at the watery horizon as she slowly decides on the person she will become.
Ibi Kaslik is not a water person, although she likes the expression "stippled waves" and enjoys looking at lakes and oceans and reading about them. She is the author of The Angel Riots and Skinny.