Tunnel Island

Tunnel Island
by Bill Gaston
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Brandon Fick
$24.95 ISBN 9781771872683

Tunnel Island is a collection of linked stories set on a fictional island in British Columbia’s Salish Sea, a place both familiar and otherworldly, realistic and mystical. Bill Gaston is a sure and steady practitioner of the short story form, with seven previous collections and a heap of award nominations to his name. All of this comes across in his quirky rendering of Tunnel Island, a place “mostly forest” with “a few thousand people” and “a bit of everything,” including people “who looked like poets, islands unto themselves,” and “wild turkeys and peacocks, descendants of farm stock that had either escaped, been let go, or wandered away from dilapidated circumstances.”

There are stories that I like more than others, but all eleven are animated by a creative slant on familiar scenarios: a brief romance, taking care of a dying loved one, spending time with a reclusive uncle, nervously preparing for a date, a group of disparate characters coming together for a unique Christmas dinner. Gaston’s stories work because of a subtle blending of tones that is difficult to achieve. The prose can appear relaxed and breezy, but that is a result of careful intention. In “Skelebones,” Gaston crafts a compelling story out of a man handing out candy on Halloween while tending to his dying partner, a wry Wiccan. Humour, tenderness, and grief abound, coming together in a transcendent ending: “He can feel her grace, even here. Her silver crescent eyes – fully open under the lids. If he can feel her, it means she is here. She has expanded her range. She is down here with him handing out candy. Her mood is fresh but also patient. He can feel her. Icy, and clean.” “All Our Children Everlasting” also touches on grief, the loss of a toddler who crawls into a kitchen cupboard and inexplicably disappears: “Then she moved that first knee another inch forward and – in my most clear visual memory she appears to expand infinitesimally – Julie was gone.” This mystical disappearance is never solved – reason versus the bizarre, animal, and unexplained is a juxtaposition Gaston repeatedly makes – and its aftermath is interspersed with a present-day narrative of the toddler’s parents remarrying in an outdoor ceremony. The final two words of the story are a fitting coda for it and the whole collection: “What next?”

Gaston succeeds in making Tunnel Island a character unto itself. Described by one of the recurring characters, Melody, it “is apparently the same size as Manhattan Island, but here it’s not people, it’s trees, which is all I see, trunk to trunk, from my front window.” It is no metropolis and not even a typical West Coast tourist destination, but guarded, hard to figure out, like its residents. The character who embodies the island most is Jack, a caretaker and handyman, known as “Old Jack,” who lives in a shack in the woods, wears distinctive tracksuits, and sports a distinctive, self-styled haircut. Fittingly, Jack’s presence bookends the collection in the stories “The Caretaker” and “Jack’s Christmas Dinner,” the former a character study, as Jack takes a lover’s questionable advice and rents out houses he’s caretaking on Airbnb, the latter about Jack convincing an acquaintance to host a Christmas dinner – to surprising, poignant success – where the main course is roadkill. What I have described is one of Tunnel Island’s chief strengths: turning characters and situations inside out. And not in a loud, obvious way. The lingering grief of the man in “Skelebones” is alluded to in “Jack’s Christmas Dinner” in a quick, almost throwaway line. Another strength is Gaston’s willingness to explore heavy topics – terminal illness, the death and disappearance of children, arson, drug addiction, isolation – with an empathetic touch. Not lightheartedness, but a realistic mix of humour and pain, while never denying the gravity of the dark.

If you’re a reader looking for something offbeat but full of heart, go out and buy Tunnel Island. Bill Gaston will guide you into a mysterious and flawed community while demonstrating his deft handling of tone, perspective, and pacing. While the writing is highly specific, universal truths exist in the eccentrics of Tunnel Island. As one of these eccentrics quips in a moment when I suspect the line between author and character narrows: “You aren’t making up the story… when it’s about everybody.”

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