Book: Sointula
Author: Bill Gaston
Published: 2004 (Raincoast Books)
Pages: 452
So this upper-middle-Canadian society lady wants to
reconnect with the son who ran away when she told him his dad was her long-lost
lover. When the lover dies, she tells her husband that she’s going to “a
friend”’s funeral, sticks a cigar tube of his ashes into her shorts, and
doesn’t take those shorts off for like weeks at a time as she immerses herself
in the Canadian shoreline wilderness on a very meandering, waterlogged journey
to where she’s heard her son is doing some whale watching.
Also drug dealing. He’s doing that too, waiting to play his
own minor but lucrative role in a huge drug trade because apparently British
Columbia weed is like the shit. (Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction and I’m
not doing that fact-finding for it.) But
he really is into whales at the same time, and he’s struggling to see which bit
of him will surface once the tides and mosquitoes and suspicious SUVs pass in
the night.
On her way to her son’s island, the lady meets a British
writer who is roughing it for the first time to get a book out of an idea that
was really just an excuse to escape his own messy divorce.
The lady turns increasingly feral and detached from her
current life while falling deeper in touch with the old. Scrounging for food
and shelter and the occasional kayak hardens her senses while muddying her
feelings. It just seems to make the writer guy horny, and delirious because he
needs his gallbladder taken out. They don’t seem to be on the same plane of
understanding, much less existence, and that creates friction both interesting
and frustrating, because of course they end up sleeping together, although not
until she decides to, although there’s not a clear reason why she decides to,
although I think it has something to do with need that slowly wakes up in her
after they land on civilization for a brief interlude.
Make sure you read this in the most humanly constructed
comfort possible, because it’s detailed in how much even human-beaten nature
fights back. You don’t need a hanky because it’s not melodramatic, but it is
deeply emotional and lonely. And wet. And it’s a good example of how a quiet
end can work if you’ve got enough story and character exhaustion to back it up.
I liked it. It was a balanced epic journey, where matching
the emotional heft of what she wanted from taking the long way to her son was
often beaten back by sheer practicality but her core reason stayed intact and
didn’t waste any theatrics in revealing itself when the time came.
It’s back to the library for this one.
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