The West Coasters

Sam Coghlan was Deputy Director and Senior Consultant of the Thames Ontario Library Service Board, Southwestern Ontario.

The West Coasters begins like a patchwork quilt — a number of disjointed pieces that are brought together into a meaningful whole. The main characters, in this historical novel of the Vancouver area, are introduced individually. They eventually become intertwined in a saga of the struggle between two sawmill operators.

But the story is more than this. It includes more than sawmills; it is a glimpse into Corcoran’s vision of what Vancouver-area life was like from 1857 to 1886. And the characters include much more than the two primary antagonists. The colour and eccentricity that one might associate with the early west coast is well represented; it even includes Gassy Jack, the creator of Gastown.

The narrative remains interesting despite some wooden characters. The few stilted scenes in the book are redeemed by a couple of riveting episodes. A sense of discontinuity is created, though, by the author’s choice to move forward a few years at a time with no explanation for this other than a new chapter title containing different dates.