Sointula

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Bill Gaston’s writing skill has moved steadily forward, from the 1989
collection Deep Cove Stories through the novels Bella Combe Journal
(1996) and The Good Body (2000). This reviewer said of Mount Appetite
(2002) that “Gaston’s youthful penchant for description at the
expense of dialogue has all but disappeared, to be replaced by an
excellent ear for rhythms, dialects, and sensibilities.”

In his latest, most realized book, Sointula (named after the small
community founded in 1901 by Finnish socialists on northern British
Columbia’s Malcolm Island), Gaston has leapfrogged to a spot occupied
by very few practising Canadian novelists. On whatever level the reader
wishes to take it, Sointula pleases the senses. Two characters—40ish
Evelyn Poole, an escapee from a safe but stultifying life as the wife of
a small-town Ontario mayor, and Peter Gore, an experience-deprived
British wannabe writer—meet and mix neuroses on a kayak journey up the
east coast of Vancouver Island, searching for Evelyn’s damaged son,
Tom. What ghosts they meet en route—Evelyn’s deceased lover, Tom’s
father, Claude (whose cremated remains she is carrying in a cigar tub);
Gore’s wife, Gail, never more than a phone call away—are stowaways
not always unwelcome.

What Gaston accomplishes in this major work is a seamless narrative,
told in the present tense, where each character’s inner voice is so
clear, so riveting, that it is impossible to downplay its relevance.
With the language of a poet (he has been published in that genre),
Gaston paints his portraits. A yacht is a “monstrous kitchen
appliance, too-white fiberglass and chrome … a fat plastic condo,”
with an “outsize American flag hanging off its wide-ass end, which
rumbles and farts and bubbles.” And there are other images, sensory
mostly—hospital smells when Claude lies dying in Victoria, smells of
cold air “like slugs and rotten wood and the sourness of exposed
roots.” Never has Gaston’s prose been as sure and solid as in
Sointula. Sense of place, of character, of plot—all of it comes
beautifully together.