There’s an ongoing argument among writers about what makes a novel literary rather than genre. This novel, which I picked up in one of my neighbourhood little libraries, solved it for me.
It’s in the voice.
Voice is how an author writes—what they choose to say and how they choose to say it. Voice is the one quality that can slow down my reading because I want to wallow in it, rather than race to find out what happens next.
Sointula is an older novel, going on twenty years, but I don’t feel it’s dated in the least. Vancouver Island and its wild places are still here echoing in the mist. Sointula, for those of you who’ve never heard of it, is a seaside town on Malcolm Island (just off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island). It’s built on the unceded Kwakwakw’akw Territory of the ‘Namgis, Mamalilikala, and Kwakuitl Nations. Sointula was created by a group of Finnish settlers in 1901 as their Utopia.
Bill Gaston weaves his awareness of the island through the experiences of Tom, a rough-edged, damaged, young man who’s there recovering from a near-wack by a Vietnamese gang. Something to do with drugs. Tom is living alone on the beach, observing and counting orcas. He’s also involved in getting drugs into B.C. — something about hearing boats on his orca sonar and building a big old bonfire when the coast is literally clear for the drug boats to come through.
Tom’s life story is described in wistful detail through his mother’s memories.
Evelyn has left her privileged life as the wife of the Mayor of Oakville, Ontario to join her dying ex in Victoria, B.C. After Claude’s passing, she puts his ashes into a glass vile, steals a double kayak, and heads north on her own. Evelyn has no money, no food, no clothes other than the ones she came with. She hasn’t seen her son Tom in a decade but she needs to now. She needs to tell him about his father’s death.
En route, Evelyn meets Peter Gore, whose gall bladder is literally killing him. Still, he joins Evelyn in her stolen kayak with his rum and his desire to write a book. Over many pages, Peter falls in love with Eve and with life.
All three characters are flawed. It would be hard to even sympathize with them if it weren’t for the elegant backstories Gaston weaves throughout this masterful story. I see myself in Evelyn’s estrangement from her grown son and her desperation to find peace in the wild hollows. I love her outlaw spirit. Sointula means “place of harmony” and in all the chaos of travel, sickness, grime, and starvation—traveling without funds is not clean nor romantic—it seems that harmony prevails. Even Love.
Reading Sointula was almost enough to make me get in the car and drive north two hours to Port McNeill. From there it’s only a short ferry ride to Malcolm Island. The land itself plays a character in this story and the tale borders on travel writing.
It was enough to make me look for more Gaston books and take a deep dive into Can Lit.
