The Island

Shannon Hengen is an assistant professor of English at Laurentian
University.

This evocative one-act piece by the celebrated Quebec novelist is
similar in tone and theme to her fiction. The main action involves two
imminent deaths from AIDS. It occurs against a postmodern backdrop—the
tropical island of the title—a dislocated place where dreams die but
nostalgia lingers. The time is Christmas in the present.

Blais’s dialogue survives the translation and is at times remarkably
poetic, especially in passages describing an overgrown garden (one of
the play’s central images). What does not appear is the humour Blais
calls attention to in an interview in the October Books in Canada.
“People who think I’m sombre,” says Blais, “don’t see the
humour in my work.” An admirer of her writing, I nevertheless also
miss in this play what she calls the “hope” she gives her readers.

An aging alcoholic woman is “rescued” from the recovery her son has
planned for her, by one of the members of a group that frequents a bar
(where most of the action occurs). A heroin addict, tortured by the
memory of his rape by a priest, helps one of the AIDS victims to plan
suicide. Such typically Blais-like plots satisfy even though they evoke
resignation rather than humour or hope.