October Ferry to Gabriola

by Malcolm Lowry

October Ferry to Gabriola, like Malcolm Lowry's generously praised Under the Volcano, is a romantic, convoluted prose journey in quest of an easeful death. It is not a completed novel, however. According to Margerie Lowry, the author's widow, this published version is her "sorting out" of numerous drafts of chapters, paragraphs and even sentences that Lowry began to write in 1946.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, British Literature, 20th Century

332 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Malcolm Lowry was a British novelist and poet whose masterpiece Under the Volcano is widely hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Born near Liverpool, England, Lowry grew up in a prominent, wealthy family and chafed under the expectations placed upon him by parents and boarding school. He wrote passionately on the themes of exile and despair, and his own wanderlust and erratic lifestyle made him an icon to later generations of writers.

Lowry died in a rented cottage in the village of Ripe, Sussex, where he was living with wife Margerie after having returned to England in the summer of 1955, ill and impoverished. The coroner's verdict was death by misadventure, and the causes of death given as inhalation of stomach contents, barbiturate poisoning, and excessive consumption of alcohol.

It has been suggested that his death was a suicide. Inconsistencies in the accounts given by his wife at various times about what happened at the night of his death have also given rise to suspicions of murder.

Lowry is buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist in Ripe. Lowry reputedly wrote his own epitaph: "Here lies Malcolm Lowry, late of the Bowery, whose prose was flowery, and often glowery. He lived nightly, and drank daily, and died playing the ukulele," but the epitaph does not appear on his gravestone

Reviews

[Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Malcolm Lowry is famous for two things: his gargantuan appetite for alcohol, and for producing one of the twentieth century's finest novels, Under the Volcano. He is also known for living for a time in a squatter's shack on the beach in British Columbia, which burnt down during the War.

Lowry has had as many novels published after his death as before, thanks to the devotion of his wife Margerie, herself a writer. There is an "Editor's note" at the end of this work that explains that what we have in October ferry to Gabriola is all Lowry's work, but assembled by Margerie: she explains that some themes and characters in the novel have not been fully executed as Lowry intended, but she decided against adding anything that was not written by him.

Like Under the Volcano, October ferry to Gabriola draws heavily on Lowry's life; his drinking, his flawed relationships, and his time in his shack at Dollarton. We meet the main protagonists - Ethan Llewellyn and his wife Jacqui - on a Greyhound bus heading for Gabriola Island to look at property to start a new life. Through a series of flashbacks, the story of Ethan emerges. He is a man haunted by the suicide of his College roommate, a death he feels he could have prevented, and in some ways may have provoked, but that he can't remember clearly owing to being drunk at the time (drinking being a recurring theme of this novel).

He becomes a lawyer, and spends a short time in the Army during the war, but not in combat. When he comes home, his house burns down during a series of unexplained fires around the area (fire being another recurring theme of this novel). He and Jacqui then spend some years squatting in a shack on the inlet, before the threat of eviction sees them move unhappily to an apartment in Vancouver. Ethan can't bear the thought of losing their shack; Jacqui has an old friend who lives on Gabriola Island, where there is a house (or is it a block of land?) for sale - hence the bus trip.

On this story Lowry hangs many themes: whether someone has a fate, or whether they might be cursed, how, if we think we are a plaything of fate, we begin to lose the power to make decisions, and how faith can be highly desired but still unattainable. He shows how guilt can paralyse a man, and how a simple life can redeem him.

While this book has an ending, it is unfinished in other ways. Ethan and Jacqui have a son that rarely makes an appearance; Jaqui's father, 'The McCandless', who is versed in the occult, apparently was meant to be a bigger presence in the novel, and there are some extended scenes in the book that seem to be part of a plotline that goes nowhere (an example being a long strange thought sequence, or is it a conversation? in a bar about capital punishment).

This is a modernistic work in some ways, with both Ethan and Jacqui searching for meaning, and Ethan, after their house burns down, getting drawn into thinking that his life was causing all the fires in town. In fact at that stage of the novel his and Jacqui's lives are spiralling out of control, due to their heavy drinking. Both Ethan and Jacqui spent large portions of this novel under the influence, and sometimes the writing reflects that, when coherence begins to slip.

There is no doubt that Lowry is a magnificent writer; although at times he can be wordy, and those words can have a touch of baroque about them, his ability to create magnificent descriptive passages are in evidence here. The reader sees the beauty of the inlet, the squalor of the bars in Canada, the destruction of old Vancouver in prose that both grabs the reader and draws them on.

Ethan's attachment to the shack becomes almost overwhelming during the course of the book, so much so that it seems that he will lose the chance to move forward into a new phase of his life on Gabriola. When the ferry initially turns back, it seems all is lost, but when Ethan and Jacqui get an important piece of news, it enables Ethan to take the first steps towards his future. After a novel of disappointment, fear and loathing, it seems that, in the dark of the night and silhouetted by flaming trees, hope has been rekindled. One has the feeling that Lowry was hoping to follow the same path - a hope that was dashed before he completed this book, with his death in 1957.

This book should not be the first Lowry that a reader should tackle - Under the volcano is better put together and is a finished masterpiece, albeit with a more tragic plot than October ferry to Gabriola - but if you have read and enjoyed Under the Volcano, October ferry to Gabriola is well worth reading.

[Freddy Fossey-Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to express how much I enjoyed reading this, more than I've enjoyed reading anything in a long time. It's, on the surface, a relatively boring narrative that is immersed in such a historical, cultural and sociopolitical sense that, just by reading it, I felt I've learnt so much about so many disperate topics.

More than that, however, I just haven't found a main character I've related to more in... maybe ever. It's a quite anodyne, and not necessarily useful, comment, but this book felt like it was written for me. And it's the sort of book I wish I had the ability to write

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 2 out of 5]

While it's a miracle Under the Volcano was ever even finished, that Lowry survived even that long (Though Lunar Caustic was started long before Volcano, the insane nature of that little book which takes place in Bellevue in New York sets the stage for the autobiographical chronology to follow - from there to Mexico, then onto California, Canada, and I forget the rest) is miraculous. This one reads like Thomas Wolfe on grain alcohol, extremely potent acid, grade-A crack. I doubt the book should have ever been published but I understand - I guess - Margerie's effort to get out his last complete text is valiant. Either that or a check. Maybe both. A little biographical research into Lowry's last years and death make the madness of the language even more schizophrenic, unraveled, the mind and body in total decay, fighting for one last homage to language and love. I remember an interview with Lowry's Volcano publisher on his first meeting of the author in New York: "I knew the man behind Volcano knew something about drinking, and that he was a literary master: I couldn't wait to see the latter in the flesh and take him around New York. What I was met with was one of the most astonishing figures I have ever seen in my life. I have never seen anyone drink like that." From a New York publisher that's something. Lowry was intentive till the end, no doubt - he even had a cure for delirium tremens involving a silk tie as a pulley lever, bringing the glass right to his mouth. Check it out in the case you're studying the Lowry ouverture. Lowry was (sub)human - we don't go searching for Moby Dick in White Jacket, after all.

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It was as if they had exchanged sunlight on water for photographs of sunlight on water, cool commotion of blowing grasses and pennyroyal, or reeds and the rippling waters, the soaring love with which they followed migrating birds, for the tragic incidental music that always accompanies documentaries involving blowing grasses, rippling waters and migrating birds, and soon they would not be able to have told the difference, perhaps prefer the incidental music for which they had to be as thankful for as the films. Soon they might not even have that."

a whole lotta commas, and I'm inclined to say that this book is self-indulgent drivel, which there is most certainly some of that. But, but! It is truly a great book. Every sentimental chord of my Vancouver history loving self is pleased.

[Liana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Insufferable. Ridiculous use of semicolons in the longest sentences known to humankind. Couldn't bring myself to finish it: unusual for me.

[Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

October Ferry to Gabriola is not nearly as terrible as some of the reviews on here make it out to be, but it hardly stands on its own either. Readers should know going in that it is an unfinished piece, and read it as such. Some ideas do not get explored in full, and some events are vague or unexplained - the editor's note at the end admits as much. But other moments are very beautiful when Lowry's talent for careful, insightful description and observation shines through. And at other times, his interest in the odd fragments of language and learning provide a similar effect as in Under the Volcano. Readers who have spent any time in Vancouver the descriptions of the city and its utilitarian/puritanical civic spirit very apt. It's still a slog at times, but definitely worth pushing through if you're a general Lowry fan.

[Barth Siemens · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not realize how disjointed this writing would be. Others have described why I may have expected just this. Apparently there is an editor's note at the end that also excuses the lack of cohesive thought. Might the note have been better placed at the beginning?

[Maggie H · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too meandering and convoluted for my taste. There were too many subplots, and several were incomplete.

[John Ledingham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being a novel by one of the Great voices on my home and surrounding locales it was cool, but this book was also seriously underedited, overwritten, rambling and rough, and not in the Romantic overflowing expression sense but in a seriously tedious stream of pop culture and streetsign consciousness that when you divorce even the implicit exoticism Lowry's writing of my home there's little left. At the SAME TIME there is a great novel of the land and moreover a great novel of a MAN late in his life, wracked by guilts fears and hopes so much more modest and honest and vulnerable than anything in the grand monument to Self and that most heroic form of fragility Self-Destruction in Under The Volcano - but it is buried beneath about 200 pages of mundanity and distration. I know I know this is sacrilege!! certainly in my dogmatic school days this kind of unfocused heft would trade for something like artistic reality ITSELF and my criticisms would come up nothing short of unworthy IDIOCY. Well fair enough. Maybe I'm not the man for this novel anymore. But then he just finished this in the nick of dying time, and his wife, doing all she could to respect every last word he'd written, edited it together after his death. This novel as we have it now is more a tribute to the man in respect to his words, a sentimental celebration of his robust now dormant power of CREATION as it is any attempt at creating a slim, digestible, winning literary tale. It is what it is. And I liked it. It's cool. Stupid of me to wish it was anything else. I'll leave it at the liking.

[Filjan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stream of drunken consciousness. It's like a practice run for Under the Volcano which is almost my favourite book.

I don't resent having read this because of chimes in with my own melancholy, but I'm not sure they should have bothered to publish it, so incomplete is it.

[Abeka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apparemment le roman a été largement réécrit par Madame Lowry. Passé cette frustration, reste un bouquin fascinant.

[Keith Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story of a long marriage affected by loss and sustained by hope. Good sentences, but I couldn't get through it because of the stream of consciousness writing.

[Pat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Agree with earlier poster - longest sentences ever. I find it a hard slog.