Sointula

Bill Gaston

Raincoast Books

I like fic­tion when it gives me new ideas and I have to put the book down and pick up a dic­tio­nary or run some­thing through Google — or when details I had never noticed before sud­denly seem obvious. Sointula by Bill Gaston (Raincoast Books) is about a middle-class woman who flies west to visit a dying ex-boyfriend, suf­fers a break­down, steals a kayak and pad­dles north along Vancouver Island in search of her estranged son. The book is filled with inter­est­ing facts and his­tory, but what got me googling were sud­denly obvi­ous details, such as how rare cougars are in First Nations art on the west coast, even though they dom­i­nate in the region. And (apro­pos of Vancouver’s rep­u­ta­tion as an unfriendly city) an expla­na­tion of social ten­sion on the west coast as a symp­tom of its “geog­ra­phy of frus­tra­tion,” peo­ple crowded like “ants pil­ing up at the shore, shov­ing, milling, get­ting on top of each other,” ner­vous sys­tems “hopped up and owly” from the tec­tonic stresses beneath them. Although his char­ac­ters are either clin­i­cally depressed or in men­tal col­lapse, Gaston’s story is never bleak. These peo­ple are famil­iar, and they suit the set­ting: the wilder parts of Georgia Strait, beau­ti­ful one moment, men­ac­ing the next.