The Grey Islands

David A. Kent teaches English at Centennial College and is the editor of
Christian Poetry in Canada.

The subtitle of The Grey Islands: A Journey suggests the essentially archetypal pattern of John Steffler’s intriguing narrative: the search for restoration in nature. Some unspecified crisis prompts the protagonist to leave his job, wife, and children in order to live on a remote, rocky, and abandoned island off the northern coast of Newfoundland. His experiences and reflections are recorded in diary-like entries which alternate between poetry (usually spare but precise lines of description) and prose (sometimes richly dramatic monologues featuring superstitions, anecdotes, or dark tales of life in the farthest outports). At first the alien and the novice, he gradually acquires the necessary survival strategies and becomes one with the “island” (p.148) and with the fishermen who make intermittent visits (a memorable experience of fishing for cod is vividly recalled). Memories, hallucinations, and the fantasies of the isolate mix uncertainly throughout the account, and we are brought even closer to Carn, the reputed madman who once occupied the cabin that the speaker eventually appropriates. But we do not end in madness. Instead, the speaker, immersed in nature, becomes aware of some elemental power and a “value / in daily things” (p. 103). Steffler’s prose and poetry are disciplined and singularly successful in conveying the sense of the primeval in this Newfoundland place. Just as we never learn the reason for the hero’s quest, so too we apparently are given two alternate endings to ponder, an ambivalence suited to the speaker’s new dilemma: to stay among the outports, or to return to the “civilized” world.