Intertidal Life

Priscilla Galloway was an English consultant in Willowdale, Ontario.

Born and raised in the eastern United States. Audrey Thomas has made Canada her home since 1959; she lived for a number of years on the gulf island of Galiano, which provides the major setting of Intertidal Life; she lives now in Vancouver.

Among Canadian short story virtuosi, Audrey Thomas has long had an honoured place, won with such works as Ten Green Bottles (1967), Ladies and Escorts (1977), and Real Mothers (1981). Her story awards include second prize in 1980 National Magazine Awards, in both the 1980 and 1981 CBC Literary Contests, and in the 1981 Chatelaine Fiction Contest. Her novels include the innovative and experimental Blown Figures (1975), Songs My Mother Taught Me (1973), and Latakia (1979).

With Intertidal Life, Thomas moves definitively into the top rank of Canadian novelists. Intertidal Life is Alice Hoye’s story; it deals with the events around the breakdown of her marriage and her reflection on these events from a perspective of seven years later, as she faces a serious operation.

As the events of the novel begin, Alice lives with her three daughters — a version of a return to nature — in an old cabin she and Peter have rebuilt on the island. Peter finally found the gold carpet, the finishing touch for the new room they added to the old structure. But even while he worked on the cabin, commuting from Vancouver, Peter was starting an affair with Alice’s friend Anne-Marie, a strange affair in which he was always impotent.

Through the novel runs a litany of regret. Alice continually reports her own inner dialogue, all the loving words that she never managed to say to Peter; the soups she left simmering on the stove when he came for his weekends with the girls never spoke loudly enough.

Now and again, when Alice comes off the ferry and Peter is about to board it for his return to Vancouver, Alice invites him back to the cabin with her and they make love. It’s good, more adventurous than before, but it was always good. Peter sometimes has qualms of loyalty to a new lover and rejects Alice’s quiet offer. Peter continues to form new liaisons — with friends of Alice’s.

Peter joins the hippy and commune scene. While Alice is not judgmental, she fairly quickly decides that somebody has to remain a fully functioning adult, and that someone seems to have to be her.

However, the island’s hippy community from Coon Bay keep inviting themselves in to take baths or bake bread, infuriating Alice with their casual attitude to her supplies, her telephone, and her home. Raven, Selene’s partner, eventually moves into Alice’s bed on occasion.

The novel is about Alice’s relationship with her women friends as much as with Peter, however. The women on the island are survivors, in the tough environment of an intertidal pool, not lavishly nourished, but out of the swell and tumult of the ocean, at least for the time being. Stella and Trudl are eventually drawn into Peter’s orbit; the three engage in a mystic experience to produce a mandala. Harold, Stella’s deaf lover, and Glenn, Trudl’s lover, are discarded. Alice is again left out, just as she was left out of the cliques at school.

No plot summary can, however, do justice to this complex novel, nor can a brief review do much more than praise the novel’s style and structure. The novel is told from Alice’s perspective. Alice is a writer, so it is natural for her to play with words and with the endless ambiguities of words. From the Peace roses in her garden. Alice’s mind jumps to “Rose again from the dead, he. First entry under ‘rose’ in her Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. She had never made that connection before but was looking up the word to find out something else. Rose of Sharon, was it?” In structure, the novel might be compared to an extraordinarily rich painting, in which various scenes are in turn filled in and expanded, layered; connections in time move backward and forward.

Intertidal Life is one of the finest novels I have read for a long time. I had the same kind of pleasure from it, the same kind of thrill, as from Laurence’s The Diviners. It’s a safe bet that this one will be high on the short list for Canada’s top fiction awards this year.