The Wanton Troopers

by Alden Nowlan

In this new edition of Alden Nowlan’s poignant first novel, published posthumously in 1988, a boy growing up in a small Nova Scotia mill town is abandoned by the young mother he adores. Family relationships, sexual confusions, and the pains of love are rendered with deep and authentic feeling. This is an essential book for all readers who have admired the work of this major Canadian writer.

Genres: Canada

172 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Akreid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nowlan's unique voice provides this portrayal of rural life in the Maritimes. Because it is semi-autobiographical, having read some of Nowlan's other work will make you appreciate it more. There's no mistaking Kevin O'Brien for Nowlan. And there's no mistaking Nowlan as a great poet with the richness of image.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is much I appreciate about this book:

-The gorgeous prose and poetic turns of phrase and image
-The fully realized, complex characters. No stock here, the people are very real, flawed, and yet Nowlan calls on them with love and, when necessary, forgiveness.
-The honesty
-The consistency of the child's perspective, which allows a certain naivete yet never flinches at the sometimes gory details of the story
-The dialogue, which ranges from gritty to bullyish taunting to whimsical to philosophical-theological to drunken carousing

In terms of theme, I'm not sure if it was intended and I'm sure Nowlan wouldn't have described it this way, but the novel powerfully shows the psychological damage caused by toxic masculinity. Kevin's father, like all the mill-working men in his little town, is trapped by poverty and dependence and doesn't feel worthy or strong no matter how super-humanly strong he is forced to be by circumstance, pride and his own strict upbringing.

The old lady with the hot brick on her belly preaching wax gospel from Kevin's living room 24/7 furthered the damage, the guilt, the striving for some arbitrary and impossible perfection. Here, Catholicism and poverty terrorize the psyche. As autobiographical as this story is, it's a wonder Nowlan made it out in one piece. Emotionally, perhaps he did not, but he was at least able to channel great feeling and insight into his poetry.

[Paula Dembeck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alden Nowlan was a Canadian poet and novelist who was born in 1933 in Nova Scotia and died an early death in 1983 from emphysema. Nowlan’s work has been praised for reflecting the world in which he grew up, when poverty and religion were deeply embedded in the lives of those who lived in the maritime provinces during this time period. He wrote his first novel, “The Wanton Troops” in 1960, tried once to have it published and when his effort failed, put the manuscript aside; it was not published until 1988, after his death. The novel featured a young boy called Kevin O’Brien and Nowlan continued Kevin’s story in his second novel, “various persons known as kevin o’brien” which was published in 1973. Both novels are highly autobiographical.

In “The Wanton Troopers” readers meet Kevin, a sensitive young child with an active imagination, trying to cope with the violence, alcoholism and grinding poverty that permeates his small mill town community and his meager home. From the beginning, it is clear Kevin believes in God and considers himself a Christian. Bible stories appeal to him and he often imagines himself as a hero from the Old Testament during his hours at play. However, by the end of the novel, Kevin is dispirited and skeptical about religion, after he believes God has failed him.

Nowlan shares Kevin’s awkwardness as he closes in on his teenage years, harangued by his obsessive, god-fearing grandmother Martha. He is loved unconditionally by his kind mother Mary, but mostly ignored by Judd, his unemployed, alcoholic and violent father. Judd, accepts Martha’s unquestioning approach to their life of grinding poverty, believes in her religious views and never challenges her. He is an apathetic man, without ambition or any desire to better life for himself or his family. Mary is frustrated by his indifference, passivity and laziness, tired of their poverty, her critical mother-in-law and their hopeless future. She decides she can no longer live in this stifling, sad environment and abandons their home, leaving behind the young son who adored her. Kevin is heartbroken knowing once she leaves, she will never return.

This story explores family relationships and how religion played an important role in individual lives, families and communities during that time. When readers first meet Kevin, he is a young boy who accepts Christianity without question, but as his life spins out of control, he begs God for help and fails to get a response. Unable to sustain the hope God is there for him, Kevin begins to question whether God even exists.

Nowlan’s powerful narrative describes how Kevin’s grandmother Martha, an obsessed, fundamentalist Baptist who believed in every word in the bible, accepts being poor because it is God’s will. She often spouts lectures on sin and sings religious songs during her day. Martha believes it is everyone’s duty to accept God’s will and the direction he has determined their life will be. However, Nowlan shows how her belief in the existence of a higher being has more to do with meeting her own ends and gaining power over her family. She uses religion to criticize the daughter-in-law she dislikes, to train Kevin by threatening him with religious punishment and to find comfort in her suffering.

The story raises important questions about religion, exposing how easy it is for people like Martha and an entire community, to manipulate religious doctrine for their own ends. How it can be used to dictate and control as well as inform and teach. His portrait of Martha leads readers to question whether her stoicism served to hide her feelings of self-righteousness and moral superiority, was a camouflage for her despair or a cover for her vindictiveness.

As the narrative unfolds, readers see Kevin continually finding himself in situations he cannot control, asking for help from a God who does not answer. He is left searching for hope and drowning in despair.

This is a sad but ultimately beautiful book. Nowlan courageously brings up issues many writers of the time avoided, concerned if they raised them, they would come under criticism from publishers and readers and ultimately affect book sales. When he first submitted it for publishing and it was refused, it probably had more to do with the timing than the quality of the work.

It proved to be an excellent read.

[Stephen Ring · Rating 4 out of 5]

My introduction to Alden Nowlan was in his role solely as a poet. I actually did not realize until discovering this novel that he wrote prose, and regrt as David Adams Richard shares that the novel was never published early in his career. A bittersweet powerful coming of age tale whose powerful poetic description take it out of the usual fare of child struggling with poverty and dysfunctional family life.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poetic and poignant story, Nowlan crafts the child’s perspective in a timeless manner, jolting us into the dark times that children experience: hunger, bullying, parental/marital discord and sending us back to our own childhood adventures and sorrows.
Nowlan depicts the hard rural times in the 1940’s. His characters are raw and complete showing humans as the truly violent, tender, crazy, intelligent, ignorant delightful creatures that they are.

[Kereesa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Wanton Troopers is a story of innocence, perception, and destiny as well as being semi-autobiographical. It is the story of young Kevin O'Brien growing up in a abusive, poverty-stricken family in a poverty-stricken, religious town in Nova Scotia. Growing up with an emotionally dependent, young mother, a drunken, work-driven father, and a grandmother who spouts sin and religions throughout it all, Kevin faces bullying, his mother's adultery, and the confusion that each of us face: where does he belong?

Wanton Troopers was easily one of my more liked novels of this year, and especially in my seminar class. It was utterly depressing, but it was beautifully real in a way that moved me. Kevin is a fascinating protagonist, not only because he faces such challenges and rises above them to some degree, but because he's so innocent, and because he's multi-faced to the people around him.

Let me elaborate. I like Kevin because throughout the book he's so frighteningly naive of the world surrounding him. His whoring mother, his drunken father, and the rest of his problems all force themselves onto Kevin, and while he is aware of their existence, he doesn't fully understand them in that half-instinct, half-ignorance way that all children do. That ignorance is coupled with his fervent belief in God, and that he is, like many figures in the Bible, special and meant for greater things. And these two things create an interesting mixture for Kevin as a protagonist. He's quite innocent, yet knows enough of the world instinctively, and at the same time is influenced by the fervor his grandmother spats at him that nearly deforms his way of thinking because he doesn't understand what's really going on when she's screaming "SIN SIN SIN!" at him. (That's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the picture.) Anyway, that mixture of knowledge, and yet not knowing of how the knowledge functions makes Kevin such an interesting character to watch and see the world through.

I also really like Kevin because he's has so many personalities for all the situations and people he has to be. With his mother, he's sweet, kind and gentle while with he's father he becomes tougher, and more of a boy. And it's interesting to see that inherit pleasing nature in him that, I think, applies to all of us in some form or fashion. We really didn't talk about this in class much, but I thought it was fascinating the way Nowlan kind of points that feature out about ourselves, and how essentially we do, in a way, have split personalities.

I think what I'm trying to get at is that Kevin reminded me of myself in a lot of ways, because he embodied the perfect mind frame of what it is to be a child, especially one just on the cusp of adolescence with that half-knowing/half-innocent awareness.

So the story in The Wanton Troopers has that typical coming of age style to it, mixed in with Nowlan's social commentary on poverty-stricken, labour-class dominated mid-20th century Nova Scotia. And thematically it's outstanding in a lot of ways, with it's commentary on religion, the class system, and the Maritimes even in general. My favorite, or at least the one that interests me the most, is actually Kevin's relationship with his parents. I love the way Nowlan captures the odd relationship he has both with his mother and father. It's so interesting to see how Kevin feels about their obvious sinful, (or sinful at least in the way his grandmother describes), natures, yet at the same time trying to hold on to his imagery of them as perfect beings. In many ways it captures our own feelings about our parents, in that they're almost godlike until they inevitably become human in our eyes. Again, that's that perfect description of what you go through as you become an adolescent, and Nowlan just so easily recreates that feeling in Kevin who's so utterly conflicted by his love and hate about both his parents.

All in all, The Wanton Troopers was one of my more liked Canadian novels. It was real, it was honest, and it made me reflect on my own childhood. And while it's such an interesting book in so many other ways, I think my favorite part was how Nowlan so easily captured and wrote that feeling, that experience, that way of being, thinking, and seeing that is so essentially child-like. Read it if you're a Maritimer, read if you're a Canadian, read it nevertheless if you're not, because the Wanton Troopers is a novel to savor, think about, and discuss. 4-4.5/5

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually liked this, and it wasn't as depressing as I thought it would be. So yay!