Sointula

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Remote and desolate, the wilderness of northeastern Vancouver Island is home to only the hardiest of souls. It's spectacularly beautiful but filled with a funereal march of endless days of rain and isolation. One wouldn't think it an auspicious meeting place, yet it is here that the lives of three wandering souls intersect. Evelyn Poole, called to the deathbed of her first love, yields to a tide of emotions and impulsively flees her husband and their privileged life, abandoning her luggage, credit cards, and I.D. -- and spending her remaining cash -- along the way. Purloining first an inflatable raft and then a more suitable kayak found on the beach, she paddles off on a journey to the small fishing village of Sointula, where her long-estranged son, Tom, is studying the behavior of whales. Tom is battling his own demons, however, and presently preferring the company of aquatic mammals, is unlikely to welcome an unexpected reunion. Add to this combustible duo the presence of Peter Gore, a restless English expat attempting to reinvent himself as a travel writer, and the stage is set for a novel of disarming appeal and affecting comedy.

With its harsh yet alluring landscape, Sointula is a novel rich in poetic imagery, deeply felt emotion, and depth of understanding. A brilliantly talented writer, Gaston has imagined a human comedy that is warm, touching, and a joy to discover. (Summer 2006 Selection)

Publishers Weekly

A search for the remote island village of Sointula, a "place of harmony" on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, drives Canadian novelist Gaston's latest. Spurred by the death of her first, long-ago lover, Claude, Evelyn Poole, the unhappy wife of the mayor of Oakville, Ontario, flees her husband and their small city to look for her grown son, Tom. She crosses the continent and, fighting hunger and prescription drug withdrawal, undertakes a dangerous, improbable kayak journey to Malcolm's Island, teaming up with drifting retired high school teacher Peter Gore, who is trying unsuccessfully to become a travel writer. Weakened and starved for civilization, Evelyn and Peter begin to lose themselves in the towering wilderness, as Gaston tracks their unreliable impressions. Avoiding clich or easy nature-worship, Gaston (The Cameraman) is that rare writer who can peel back the deepest fears of Nature (abandonment, pain, futility) and find a vision of vehement, imperfect beauty. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Two midlife crises are enriched and transformed by the Canadian near-wilderness in this ambitious novel from the Ontario author of Mount Appetite (2005). It's a precisely woven tapestry that gradually connects the odysseys and labors of its three protagonists. Transplanted Englishman Peter Gore has left his marriage and his job as a biology teacher to explore northwestern British Columbia, as far as the village of Sointula on Malcolm Island (off Vancouver), where the pristine past lives on, and where Finnish emigrants had established a utopian community ("Sointula" being Finnish for "harmony"). Fortyish Evelyn Poole has abandoned her husband Roy (mayor of an Ontario hamlet), summoned to the deathbed of her long-ago lover Claude Longpre. Following Claude's death, she forms an oddball alliance with Peter, en route to Sointula and a reunion with her estranged son Tom, who left the family long before she did, during his troubled ("sociopathic") adolescence. Meanwhile, Tom Poole has become a "whale man," assisting in ecology student Catherine Macleod's research, living with wounds sustained when a botched drug deal precipitated a gun battle, and waiting for his past to catch up with him. Gaston moves among their several stories with masterly skill, filling in narrative gaps with perfectly judged flashbacks (to Tom's youth; Evelyn's stultifying marriage; ecstatic years with Claude; and recent vigil at his deathbed), while painting an astonishingly detailed picture of a world so distant it seems indeed to belong to another time. Characterizations of Evelyn and Peter are particularly rich and searching (when they talk about sex, the book reaches irresistible comic heights), and the resolution oftheir quests, in an extended denouement comprising one brilliant scene after another, is virtually beyond praise. Gaston may be to Canadian fiction what Ken Kesey was to American fiction of the 1960s: a renegade lyricist with a soaring, ineffably generous narrative imagination.