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.
Over the holidays, I discovered this used book in our local bookstore and decided to read it. This is the kind of story one can call delightful. It was written by Edith Nesbit who wrote under the pen name E. Nesbit. Her biography says: “She was a mischievous, tomboyish child who grew into an unconventional adult. With her husband, Hubert Bland, she was one of the founder members of the socialist Fabian Society; their household became a centre of the socialist and literary circles of the time. The chaos of their Bohemian home . . . was regularly increased by the presence of their children and numerous friends, among whom were George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.
Like Mrs. Barnstable, the mother of The Railway Children, Edith was a published writer, and a good one. This Puffin Classic (first published in 1906 and this edition republished in 1994) has several full pages of pen and ink sketches that are remarkable. The writing voice reminded me of C. S. Lewis and the children of the Pevensies. Since the Chronicles of Narnia weren’t published until the 1950s, I can’t help but wonder if Lewis read and liked Nesbit’s books. Perhaps some of the Railway Children adventures rubbed off on him.
The three children: Roberta (Bobbie) who turns twelve, Phyllis who seems to be around eight years old, and Peter who turns ten, have all sorts of adventures after their father mysteriously disappears and they have to move from London into the countryside. They are suddenly impoverished, so their mother spends long hours writing and selling stories in order to make ends meet. With all kinds of free time at Three Chimneys, their new cottage, the children make friends with the locals—particularly Perks the Porter and the Station Master. They also befriend a wealthy and wise old gentleman who regularly rides the train and helps them solve the mystery of their father.
Things I loved about this story:
The trains of course. Who doesn’t love the old fashioned “Harry Potter” trains winding their way through the English countryside.
The innocence of it all. The children were allowed to roam free and get into mischief, as I did as a kid. This was a time in which a man could kiss a young girl on the cheek in the spirit of friendship and gratitude and not be maligned for it.
The writing, so clear, detailed, and descriptive.
“There was a cake on the table covered with white sugar, with ‘Dear Bobbie’ on it in pink sweets, and there were buns and jam; but the nicest thing was that the big table was almost covered with flowers — wall-flowers were laid all round the tea-tray — there was a ring of forget-me-nots round each plate. The cake had a wreath of white lilac round it, and in the middle was something that looked like a pattern all done with single blooms of lilac or wallflower or laburnum” (73).
The strength of character in all whom we meet.
Frank discussions about the differences between boys and girls, and corrections made with regard to stereotypical statements. (The doctor is somewhat old fashioned.)
A film of this particular story was produced in 1970 and the trailer seems quite true to the book. Apparently, the children returned recently in another film: The Railway Children Return (2022). This one concerns a different group of children and is set in 1944, when the children are evacuated from Manchester to East Yorkshire because of the bombings.
Thank you, Miss Nesbit for bringing your stories to the world.
In 2007, poet-author Gil Adamson (Gillian) published her award-winning debut novel, The Outlander. Thirteen years later, we are reading the sequel. It’s almost in real time.
The Outlander tells the story of nineteen-year-old Mary Boulton who kills her husband and flees into the Canadian Rockies pursued by her two brothers-in-law. There she meets several eccentric characters in an Alberta mining town, one of whom she falls in love with—William Moreland, the Ridgerunner. Adamson wondered what would happen if this couple had a child. They did, and thirteen years later we’re reading about the boy’s internal struggles in this touching coming-of-age story.
Jack Boulton is a twelve-year-old boy. His mother, Mary, died the previous fall. Jack got sick, and his father left him with a local nun so he could go back to his previous life of crime. Blowing up mines and robbing banks is ridgerunner senior’s forte. But William’s motives are heartfelt. He’s trying to make a slew of money so he and his boy can live somewhere peacefully. Plus, he’s trying to cope with his wife’s unexpected death. The only (well, maybe not the only) problem is, the nun, one Emelia Cload has decided that the boy is hers.
Jack is not enamored with this decision, and early in the story, he escapes his regimented captivity and heads home. The nun (which is what she is called most often) wants him back and puts up a wanted poster with a $2000 reward for his return. If that seems like odd behaviour for a nun, brace yourself. That’s only the beginning. The nun is an unexpected antagonist.
The boy learns to shoot, live alone, take a beating, fend for himself and, in short order, becomes a man. In fact, Jack becomes the Ridgerunner himself. The parallels between father and son are a theme of this story. They are both outlaws, on the run, and trying to survive in hostile terrain.
This is a rollicking literary adventure told in three parts. The horses, guns, and wild animals give it a western feel. At one point, Moreland spends three days treed by an old grizzly. It’s character-driven but there’s plenty of action, tension, suspense, and dropped bombs (which I won’t reveal.) It also has an historical Can Lit feel as it’s set in and around Banff and Lake Louise, formerly the town of Laggan. Since it’s 1917 when the story begins, there are references to The Great War—the working men of a prison camp feature in the plot.
Adamson’s lyrical prose and poetic descriptions immerse us in this rugged Western Canadian landscape. She is mad with details and rich with language. “Hair in horripilating waves.” Now, there’s a word. There are bits of Nakoda, a strange language spoken by Sampson Beaver the second, and interjections of folksy wisdom. “If you’re afraid of doing something son, you’re more or less obligated to do it.” Adamson comments that allusions to Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, and True Grit, among others pepper the book and are among her influences, along with “Western and noir movies, songs, and fairy tales.” I heard shades of Lonesome Dove and The Tenderness of Wolves myself. The haunting landscape of the wild places, of pioneers, of bygone days lends itself to lyrical prose.
As I’m packing for my upcoming move, I’m weeding books.
I found this charming 1958 hardcover edition of Shirley Temple’s Storybook that was a gift to my sister and I from our aunt and uncle. It contains the fairy tales Shirley Temple loved to read to her own children.
I set it out in the sunlight for some fresh air, and while I was leafing through it, felt taken by the beautiful illustrations.
The fact that it’s 62 years old lends it magic, but it’s also very well presented with large type, small colourful illustrations, and huge bright images.
Rip Van Winkle
The Valiant Little Tailor
Dick Whittington & His Cat
Rumpelstiltskin
Beauty & The Beast
The Nightingale
The Little Lame Prince
The Sleeping Beauty
Dick Whittington & His Cat
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Rapunzel
Ali Baba & The Forty Thieves
The Magic Fishbone
The Land of Green Ginger
The Emperor’s New Clothes
The Valiant Little Tailor
The Wild Swans
Rip VanWinkle
Rumpelstilskin
I can’t wait to curl up in the stillness of winter and read these stories again. Such a treasure.
This is a wonderful article about J.R.R. Tolkien that reveals some things you might not know. For example, I didn’t know that the Shire was “more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of [Queen Victoria’s] Diamond Jubilee” and later swallowed up by Birmingham.
I want to live in the shire. If such a place exists. It did, I think, in my childhood.
That longing to be locavores, put our hands in the earth, hear the birds, pick wild mushrooms, sit by the pond, and drink from the well of joy, is latent in many of us. The pastoral is peaceful and powerful.
Every few years, I re-read Annie Proulx’s classic novel, The Shipping News. It happens when I miss the East—family and friends. When I need to submerge myself in great writing and crave a dose of mellifluent literature. When I need to feel immersed in the sea and small town camaraderie.
But, just what makes this book so endearing? What thrills and feeds me?
Characters
If you’ve never heard of it, The Shipping News chronicles, not only the various ships, yachts, and boats that put into the small harbour of Killick-Claw on the barren Newfoundland shore, but also the story of Quoyle. A quoyle is a coil of rope, and here Proulx unravels the terrifyingly beautiful tale of Quoyle’s family: ancestors who were incestuous pirates, who dragged a house to a point on the mainland when they were driven off an island for their barbary. That Quoyle determination lives on in the gentle hero of this story, in the jutting chin, in an underdog who must find his way home.
Like Proulx, Quoyle is also a writer. An American, born in Brooklyn, he stumbles into a job at The Mockingburg Record. He has no idea how to write but wants to learn. It’s that or starve, and he has a friend who gets him an interview. But constant layoffs leave Quoyle hungry. And then he meets Petal Bear: “a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering” (13). Petal is more monster than woman.
“By day she sold burglar alarms at Northern Security, at night, became a woman who could not be held back from strangers’ rooms, who would have sexual conjunction whether in stinking rest rooms or mop cupboards. She went anywhere with unknown men. Flew to nightclubs in distant cities. Made a pornographic video while wearing a mask cut from a potato chip bag. Sharpened her eyeliner pencil with the paring knife, let Quoyle wonder why his sandwich cheese was streaking with green” (14).
Oh Petal. When she vanishes with a new stranger and takes along their two little girls, Bunny aged six and Sunshine aged four and half, Quoyle goes berserk. Naturally. He loves his children, has raised them, cared for them, and now they’re gone. He calls the state police and his newfound aunt, Agnis Hamm. And then they get the news. Car wreck. Petal and the stranger are dead. But where are the kids? It turns out that Petal sold them for seven grand to a pedophile who produces homemade porn. Got a receipt from the pedo. Thank god. “Personal services.”
It’s the aunt that decides it’s time to go home—her hated brother and his wife have just died in a joint suicide pact. She’s lost the love of her life and Quoyle needs a family. So, at age thirty-six, unravelled by Petal’s brutal betrayal, Quoyle packs up his girls and heads to Newfoundland with the aunt. There, he gets a job working atThe Gammy Bird. He’s to cover car wrecks and the shipping news.
Real and honest, eccentric and larger-than-life, the crew atThe Gammy Bird are classic. Jack Buggit, British Nutbeam, Billy Pretty, even the crotch-scratching menace, Tert Card, is endearing in his own awful way. (“Face like cottage cheese clawed with a fork” (57).
photo by D. Mark Laing, 2001, Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/dmarklaing/8260930933
Setting
The landscape is a character. If you’ve ever wanted to explore Newfoundland, this book will have you packing your bags. (But only in summer, mind.) Eleven foot snowdrifts rival my capacity to love all seasons. The green house on the point is a character too. It sits empty for forty-four years until Quoyle and the aunt decide to fix it up and move in. The aunt’s first act is to dump her brother’s ashes in the outhouse and piss on them. Enough said.
Cheering for the Underdog
How can you not cheer for Quoyle, bursting with love for his daughters? Learning that he’s so much more than a third-rate newspaper reporter? Building a new family on the rock?
Issues
Proulx manages to highlight several issues without sounding preachy or forced. She does this with impeccable style through Jack Buggit’s diatribes, conversations, and Quoyle’s inner musings, and his columns. The economic situation in Newfoundland.Good friend, Dennis Buggitt, talks of going down the road to find work in Toronto. There’s no work for carpenters in Newfoundland and his dad doesn’t want him to fish. Fishing killed his brother. Quoyle fears that if Dennis takes his family to the city they’ll be lost forever. He should know. The sad story of incest and sexual assault. The Gammy Bird publishes the names of sexual offenders. Thousands of them.
“Nutbeem, I got your S.A. stories running down my computer screen. You writing it by the yard, now? Seven, eight, nine—you got eleven sexual abuse stories here. We put all this in there won’t be room for the other news.”
“You ought to see my notebook. It’s an epidemic.”
Wouldn’t that be worth a read? Nutbeem strings the stories together with precision and flourish. Some names never make the paper. Ask the aunt. Children with unique abilities. Wavey’s son Herry was born with Down’s Syndrome and there’s no support for him in the local school. So, she and Beety Buggit approach the government for funding to create a special class and provide support. Quoyle’s children, Bunny and Sunshine, are also unique. Both are expelled from nursery school in the states, yet thrive when embraced by family and community. Fishing woes. There are so many foreign trawlers fishing in the outer reaches, there are no fish left for the locals. Then, there’s the danger of riding out a storm out on the sea. Ask Jack Buggit what happened to his son, Jessen. Weather. Another character in this story, one who is most often the antagonist. Oil tankers. We’ve been fighting oil pipelines in B.C. This column by Quoyle says it all:
Nobody Hangs a Picture of an Oil Tanker
Another common sight is black oil scum along miles of landwash, like the shoreline along Cape Despond this week. Hundreds of people watched Monday morning as 14,000 metric tons of crude washed onshore from a ruptured tank of the Golden Goose. Thousands of seabirds and fish struggled in the oil, fishing boats and nets were fouled. “This is the end of this place,” said Jack Eye, 87, of Little Despond, who, as a young man, was a dory fisherman with the schooner fleet (201).
Language
Annie Proulx is a master of the craft and the writing is stunning. Proulx won a Pulitzer for this novel in 1994. I’ve really never seen anything like it: fragments of tight clipped poetic phrases, hard honest dialogue, sea-speak, words I’ve never seen, and dialect that makes us feel like we’re from the rock even if we’re not.
“The auditorium was jammed. A sweep of best clothes, old men in camphor-stinking black jackets that gnawed their underarms, women in silk and fine wools in the colors of camel, cinnabar, cayenne, bronze, persimmon, periwinkle, Aztec red. Imported Italian pumps. Hair crimped and curled, lacquered into stiff clouds. Lipstick. Red circles of rouge. The men with shaved jowls. Neckties like wrapping paper, child in sugar pink and cream. The puff of scented bodies, a murmur like bees over a red field” (276).
Myth & Metaphor
Each chapter is headed by a blurb and image from The Ashley Book of Knots. This 1944 work by Clifford W. Ashley inspired Proulx’s tale. The mix of folk tale and metaphor strengthens the story. Quoyle’s old, demented cousin ties knots to curse them and the house. Mixed with that are blurbs from The Gammy Bird, the local Killick-Claw paper where Quoyle discovers his talent for storytelling as he chronicles “The Shipping News”. This is why you can’t just watch the movie.
In 2001, Miramax released the film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules) it has all-star cast: Kevin Spacey as Quoyle, Judi Dench as the aunt, Kate Blanchett as Petal Bear, and Julianne Moore as Wavey (the tall silent woman who captures Quoyle’s heart in Killick-Claw.) As brilliant as the movie is—Annie Proulx and Robert Nelson Jacobs wrote the screenplay—it can’t replace the book.
When I was a kid, one of our family friends was Clyde Quinton, a man from Newfoundland who’d gone down the road. I remember that Clyde was a big gentle man who brought me a doll one year when I was sick. He was known for eating anything and saying simply: “food is food.” I often wonder what happened to Clyde. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve resurrected him in Quoyle.
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