The Grey Islands [Paperback]

When John Steffler’s The Grey Islands washed up onto the literary scene in 1985, it received much-deserved praise. Readers followed as the narrator, a city native from Ontario, retreated to a solitary existence for a few months on an island with no other inhabitants but the ghostly remnants of dwellers long gone and the lonely shack of the island’s recently departed madman. The page faded and we were right there on the restless sea, or in a bloodied boat. At times the narrative was harrowing as we were given glimpses of the unmitigating ferocity of land and sea, and of past lives and inhabitants wiped out-their “black skeleton houses” left as solitary reminders. At other times, we were offered humour, absurdity, and a light-hearted vision of endurance and strength, of body and spirit.
Rattling Book’s unabridged audio version of The Grey Islands is an all-access pass to this world. Steffler and a cast of Newfoundland actors give voice to the many characters of the place, its distinct language and haunting stories. Be prepared for some initial distraction due to the addition of a Maritime soundscape of gulls and boat motors. No doubt the ambient noises have also been added to provide an audio “archive” of a lifestyle largely extinct. But these sounds threaten the mood of the book, replacing it with what feels like a teleplay. Thankfully as the speakers’ words begin to inhabit Steffler’s concise and evocative verse, these distractions fade into the background.
The success of The Grey Islands depends on Steffler’s ability to give us a convincing view of the inner workings of his narrator’s mind, as well as a full sense of the people he encounters. There is the supposedly crazy erstwhile island inhabitant, Carm Denny, “holding the island in his head” while he, and we, “think it into reality.” The line between narrator, madman, and listener blurs delightfully as “We fade slowly into ghosts.” We are all caught up in the haunting, the fading sense of one self; and, like the narrator, we discover that “One look and I’ll see what I’d become completely alone.”
The dramatis personae include various fishermen and the town council who reluctantly bless the narrator’s strange leave of absence. And we are treated to an incredible amount of absence-the absence of Carm, the narrator’s wife and children, the past inhabitants of the island, Carm’s story, and of the narrator’s sense of self. Like the “rocks and houses tossed together,” there is a great deal of chaos and a need for order, and Steffler’s narrator guides us through it all, asking “how well do you know yourself? / the various people / waiting inside.”
Some of the gauntness of the local dialect seems, at first listen, to be lost in the comfortable tones of Rattling Book’s professional actors. That is until Carm Denny appears. Read by the wonderful Frank Holden, Denny sounds exactly as one would have imagined: hoarse, gentle, centred, but in the same accent as the other Newfoundlanders. The downside is that the narrator and Carm become distinct individuals, whereas, in the print version, the narrator’s identity merges and subtly blends with the mad island dweller. Carm is written without the heavy dialectical anomalies of his fellow Newfoundlanders; his speech resembes that of the narrator’s way of speaking. The narrator takes over Carm’s shack, his imagined past, his identity in order to reconstruct his own. While this blurring of identities is present as plot in the audio narrative, the differences in the actors’ voices and accents subtly obstructs the merging of the two identities.
Frank Holden’s portrayal of Carm-via Steffler’s reading-wins over the listener. Once the gulls, footsteps and creaking doors in the background are forgotten, the voice of the poet as narrator can be fully appreciated; for example, when Steffler reads the following like a prayer or incantation:

August 21. all night.

bless me or you'll have to
drag me around forever

bless me or I will not
let you go

bless me or I'll drag
you around forever

bless bless you bless me
around forever

bless me or I will not
let you go

It’s worth hearing this important work read by the poet who created it; hearing actor Frank Holden’s portrayal of Carm Denny; hearing poetry read aloud, as all poetry should be. While the haunting feeling of the text is not preserved in the audio version-it’s a little too fleshy for so ghostly a journey-we still escape time a little. We still can vicariously experience the metamorphosis of the narrator, seeing firsthand how this man creates his own identity out of rock and sea: “I’m not just a man anymore. I’m an island. The wind and the smell of space and the animals moving through.”
Heather Craig (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Since its first publication in 1985, The Grey Islands has become a classic of Canadian wilderness writing to set beside the works of Thoreau, Annie Dillard and Aldo Leopold. Using a broad range of forms and styles - lyric, anecdote, field notes, documents and pseudo-documents, ghost story, tall tale - Steffler relates the story of one man's pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland's northern peninsula. Often comic, and always deeply passionate and sensuous, The Grey Islands tells of the sharpening of perceptions whetted by solitude, wind and rock, and of the pilgrim's people - living and dead - who have striven to exist under its harsh regime. As in his other books, like That Night We Were Ravenous or his acclaimed novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Steffler's writing delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty.