Published in 1945, Cannery Row breaks with Steinbeck’s earlier models in that it is a series of sometimes disconnected stories, rather than a cohesive narrative with an obvious story arc. At first glance it appears to be a very dense novel of allegory and tenderness, looking like another story of a dissolute group of men. They’re slightly devious, definitely unreliable  and all of them victims of something: a physically abusive wife, frustrated ambitions, laziness and alcohol. Cannery Row looks like it’s a tale of male friendship and yet it is not. The women have their own cohorts: the women working for Dora the local madam and the middle class busy bodies who try to exert power over the bars and brothel. As with Tortilla Flat the author is showing us an Arthurian allegory, based on life in a particular locale. He presents the bit of Monterey, California where the daily sardine catches are processed and canned in dedicated canning factories. This part of Monterey is long since gone: Cannery Row drifted into redundancy due to overfishing and now it’s a tourist destination.

The Cannery Row of 1943 as John Steinbeck tells it, is home to a group of apparently decadent characters: “the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junkheaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses”. In his novel’s first paragraph John Steinbeck tells us what to expect of his novel. In telling us this, Steinbeck’s opening paragraphs are reminiscent of Shakespeare’s prologues to Romeo and Juliet and Henry V. We’re told the set up.

Steinbeck’s story progresses slowly and he explores his themes through different narratives. Money is a big deal. And death and rebirth. Then there is love and kindness and of course human frailty. In a letter to his friend Carlton A. Sheffield in September 1944 just after Steinbeck had finished Cannery Row, he says he wrote the book with four levels. Tantalisingly he doesn’t say what those levels are, but I think he means as a simple set of stories, as an allegory, as a picture of Cannery Row and as an antedote to war. Despite its creation date (he began the book in 1943), there are no references to World War II at all in Cannery Row. The only military reference is the dawn walk of a pair of soldiers with their girlfriends, welcoming the rising sun: “… and the men lay down and put their heads in the girls’ laps and looked up into their faces. And they smiled at each other, a tired and peaceful and wonderful secret.” Beauty not destruction, even though the men are soldiers.

So what is this short novel about? First of all money. When Mack and the boys embark on an expedition to collect a few hundred frogs that Doc, owner of the marine biology lab, will sell on, they have no money for fuel. Nor do they have a vehicle. They persuade local grocer Lee Chong to let them take his derelict car which he got in return for clearing a groceries debt. The truck doesn’t go and of course it has no fuel. Doc arranges for fuel and the boys fix the truck up well enough to get to the place where there are lots of frogs. Except the truck’s frailties are such that it can only get up hills, if it is in reverse. After several mishaps, including one of the boys ending up in jail, they have their frogs. They return triumphant to Cannery Row and throw a party for Doc in his lab. Doc arrives home long after his party is over, his lab trashed and the frogs escaped to local culverts, ponds and streams. But in between the boys arriving home triumphant with their frogs and the ill-fated party, the frogs have become a trading currency in the neighbourhood. No winners where financial greed is concerned. The boys throw another party for Doc and this one he does make and enjoy, despite the second party ending up much like the first.

And then there’s death. No Steinbeck story would be complete without a violent death. In Cannery Row it comes early with the suicide of a local man indebted to Lee Chong. By handing over an abandoned building he owns in Cannery Row before blowing his brains out, the man settles his debt to the grocer. The boys suggest that the building is in need of protection from vandals and fire, so they should stay there for a nominal rent. This is never paid, but the boys move in and turn the old fishmeal store into a home they call the Palace Flophouse. Death and rebirth.

A little glimpse into the life of a gopher flips this around. A whole chapter is dedicated to a gopher, sleek and handsome and in the prime of life. He diligently builds a home for his mate who never materialises, even though his burrow “was a place where he could settle down and raise any number of families and the burrow could increase in all directions”. Eventually he gives up, abandons his lofty palace and moves to a nearby garden known for putting out lethal gopher traps. Death finds us all. Doc exploring Pacific tide pools discovers the body of a lovely young woman “wedged between two rocks”. He chooses to not claim the bounty: “will you report it? I’m not feeling well,” he tells another man on the beach.

Love and kindness are common themes in the work of John Steinbeck and in Cannery Row it’s part of almost every subplot. Lee Chong is generous and patient with people he knows are out to rip him off or steal from him. When he’s persuaded to lend the Mack and the boys his truck: “Lee was worried but couldn’t see any way out. The dangers were there and Lee knew all of them. ‘Okay, ’ said Lee”. Doc’s endless patience with the boys even though he knows there’s an agenda somewhere. Between shifts, the women of the Bear Flag brothel take soup out to local people ill with the ’flu. Despite the exhuberant trashing of his lab, Doc helps cure Mack’s puppy of distemper. Having noticed that he only has a grubby blanket for his bed, the whores sew a quilt for Doc’s birthday. The cruelties in the book, such as the likely fate of Frankie, a mentally frail young boy, are necessary counterpoints to these and many other expressions of love.

Human frailty and agency in all their manifestations permeate Steinbeck’s work and especially Cannery Row. Every decision we make or avoid has consequences, from drinking too much to not drinking enough. In Cannery Row, everyone’s choices are resolved one way or another, from Lee Chong’s greed and willingness to accept frogs as money, through to Frankie’s theft of a $50 clock and subsequent arrest. 

In less than 40,000 words of dazzling prose there is all this and much more. Cannery Row is short but it’s extremely dense, and that’s the novel’s power. Brevity masks the hugeness of story telling that makes Cannery Row an intensely powerful novel, both in its own time and for our own.