Just off the shore of Canada’s largest city sits Toronto Island – actually a chain of islands – best known as a day-trip destination with an amusement park, beaches, yacht clubs, and an at-times-controversial airport. A 13-minute ferry ride from the downtown, the easternmost portion, Ward’s Island, is also the site of a small, distinct residential enclave of cottages.

In Adrick Brock’s assured debut novel, a group of teenage boys from the island, out on a midnight skate on the inner harbour, discover something frozen into the ice. Theo Frith is the first to spot the body: it is Dan Rainer, the groundskeeper of the local arts centre. The dramatic opening chapter is initially suggestive of a mystery novel, but it soon becomes apparent that Islanders is really about the mysteries of human relationships and community.

The novel focuses on a quartet of Islanders whose lives intertwine loosely or intimately: Dan, Theo, Theo’s mother, Yvonne, and Dan’s daughter, Maxine.

In the summer prior to Dan’s death, Yvonne secures a residency at the island’s Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts in the hope of recovering her artistic mojo. The casual bond of being islanders, their mutual artistic interests, and the tendency to be observers of the others at the centre draw Yvonne and the groundskeeper together in a short, intense, and briefly affirming mid-life affair that is deftly delineated. But like many summer-camp romances, when the residency ends, the relationship crumbles despite half-hearted attempts to salvage something from it.

Just as the island sits apart from the city, so too do the central figures feel themselves at a slight remove from people in their lives. Theo is in an uneasy relationship with a group of teens who have him procure alcohol – a vivid scene of the teens gathering in the public washroom transforms the low thrum of bullying in the group into a game of violence that pushes the responsible Theo into uncharacteristic aggression. The awareness that everyone knows of his mother’s alcoholism, and his frustration with Yvonne’s inability to cope with life, all push him away from the island. 

Yvonne, a single mother who works creating displays (particularly Christmas villages in malls), has a rocky relationship with her successful brother in the city, lives in financial precarity, and even after eight years on the island still feels like an outsider.

Dan, who briefly gains recognition for his environmental sculpture – created only on the island and meant to be worn down and dispersed over time – and is affectionately called “Maitre Dan” by his wife and daughter for his care of his family, is searching for something of his own. He is well-liked (the arts centre hosts his birthday party), but the man from northern Ontario who became an islander by marriage also feels disconnected from the community and is pained by his inability to connect with his daughter. Maxine observes that her father “was a friendless introvert whom everyone seemed to think of as a friend,” one of the poignant observations that pepper the novel. Maxine, herself, has always been independent-minded, comfortable being mostly a loner, and, on attending university, has moved downtown.

Six years after Dan’s death, both Maxine and Theo are in Whitehorse. Maxine is a nurse at the hospital and in a not-altogether satisfactory relationship. Theo, a techie, is temporarily working on a film shoot. Unable to cope with his mother’s drinking, he has cut himself off from her. Here, too, Theo and Maxine continue to be slight outsiders. In Toronto, they have little to do with each other until their paths briefly and intensely connect when Theo takes Maxine out on the ice to show her where he found her father. As young adults, they reconnect, bonded by this shared history, but in a more careful and thoughtful way than their parents.

The novel adeptly moves between timelines, gradually unspooling the affair and its fallout, Dan’s death and its after-effects, and the search for equilibrium by those who survive him. At times, Islanders is reminiscent of the work of Joan Barfoot; it is a quiet, deep exploration of ordinary human relationships, of needs, regrets, isolation, hope, and reconciliation. Themes subtly echo through the work: addiction, at the forefront of Yvonne’s life, is woven into other personal histories. And like Dan’s art, some relationships come apart and disperse, left as a memory, but like his one uncharacteristic living sculpture of two blue beeches, some lives intertwine with greater success to yield something hopeful in this accomplished first novel.

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