(This review was first published in subTerrain #60.)
The front cover picture of
Grant Buday’s 2011 Mayne Island memoir, Stranger on a Strange Island,
announces the tone of its innards unambiguously: a metallic light grey
Airstream trailer, detached, foregrounds a patch of island forest. The Gulf
Islands have long been associated with romantic getaways, spiritual
transformations, and pulchritudinous seascapes, but just months into an ongoing
eight-year stay on tiny Mayne, those visions have closed like eyes poked by Moe
the head Stooge: “November arrived. The clocks were rolled back and the rain
began to fall – and fall ... What with black clouds overhead, tall trees all
around, and no street lights, it felt positively medieval. By three in the
afternoon it was twilight, by four dark, by five so cave-black I needed a
flashlight to venture out the door. What was all that about a third less rain?”
To be clear, the Buday family’s move from Vancouver to Mayne was undertaken
more out of economic pressure than idealistic stance, but an intriguing pull in
Buday’s rumination is one between mundane necessity and spiritual hope. An
initial job of helping an employer relocate an illegally moored boat involves
this non-postcard entry: “My wet denim stuck to me like depression, my pale and
frozen hands resembled bled pork, my back was in spasm. As for my teeth, I was
clenching them so tightly against the cold that I feared for my dental work.”
Yet the book’s last chapter, of the author’s whale watching excursion with his
eight-year-old son, culminates in grace: “she jumped high, surging out of the
water with no warning, right up into the air, that bus-sized beast performing a
pirouette in the bright sunshine ... The entire ship seemed to stagger. But
there she was, twenty tonnes of mammal only twenty metres away, suspended in
one glittering airborne moment, a greeting from another world.”
It’s not all angst and
wonder. Humour, wit, irony, and satire abound, and are incorporated into the
anecdotes with the natural aplomb of a head cook festooning a three-tiered cake
with baroque curlicues. Buday is a terrifically funny writer. Past efforts in
short stories, novels, and travel essays have shown his gift for uproarious yet
accurate simile, believable punch-line dialogue, coarse slapstick, and
situational disjunction, all of it delivered in unassuming voice and smooth
transition. Here, Buday is able to display a more relaxed tone, a
conversational wisdom for his deprecatory, occasionally caustic, humour. The
mood is at times melancholic, yet the language is spry and engaging; the
autobiographical persona is a maladroit foil to Mr. Handyman, yet there’s
satisfaction and even defiance in a low-tech pullback. Buday seamlessly weaves
personal interaction with natural description, fascinating allusion with fictive
hijinks (the chapter on Mayne Island’s founding), and biographical excavation
with incisive psychological speculation. Some may not take to Buday’s penchant
for balloon puncturing, but it’s a necessary universal endeavour, and one that
yields its own occasional epiphanies, all the more earned for being honest and
tenaciously pursued: “The tree hesitated, creaked slowly, creaked loudly, and
began to tilt. With the solemn grandeur unique to the enormous, the cedar began
to splinter and groan as it gained momentum. The whole world seemed to be
toppling. The tree pitched forward then struck the ground with a whamp!
And lo, light did flood through the newly opened gap in the forest.”
