Interrupted Journey

By R. Z. Sheppard

OCTOBER FERRY TO GABRIOLA by Malcolm Lowry. Edited by Margerie Lowry. 320 pages. World. $6.95.

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. It started with his notes on a trip to the islands off British Columbia. These became a short story. Then the story grew first into a novella and finally into an amorphous novel full of Lowry's preoccupations with alcohol, mythologems, cabalistic gewgaws and theosophist arcana. In 1957, two months before he died after a bout of heavy drinking, Lowry was still struggling to tame the surge of words and images.

What emerges from Mrs. Lowry's arrangement is the story of Ethan Llewelyn, an alcoholic who gave up the practice of law when a man he had successfully defended proved to be guilty of a horrible crime. Unfortunately, Lowry never got around to filling in the details of this crucial episode in Llewelyn's life. An assortment of character sketches and plot shards adhere to a rather slack narrative line that draws Llewelyn and his wife Jacqueline through a portentous search for a new home.

By the time they near their goal--Gabriola, an island on Canada's West Coast --they have been transformed into a pair of unearthly representatives of a pagan diaspora. And not too subtly. The fire and water that drove them from their previous homes are invested with stage magic. Old men mutter about the qualities of wood as if spirits lived in the grain. Llewelyn feels foreshadowings in everything from snatches of movie dialogue to highway billboards. Symbols wash up out of the sea and appear in the air.

To Llewelyn, who somehow equates his abuse of alcohol with a magician's misuse of his powers, Gabriola beckons like a nondenominational land of the dead. Like Hades, it is a waiting room for both heaven and hell--a nice quiet place with no scheduled activities.

It is not entirely fair to hold Lowry responsible for a novel he neither completed nor published. It is unlikely, though, that given more time and health he would have been able to curb his compulsion for occulturation or tailored his ambition to fit his talents. He was a comr pulsive perfectionist, gifted with the vision to perceive paradise but unable to get his eyes off his own private hells. At his best, Lowry was sporadically brilliant, but reading him is too often like watching a man who has exceeded his capacity try to get home without stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. R.Z. Sheppard

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