The not-so-great escape

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/11/2023 (1023 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Do you want the good news or the bad news first?

Good news it is — this new mystery from Order of Canada publisher/author Anna Porter is absolutely brilliant, utterly mesmerizing.

The bad news, it is grim and depressing.

Tipping point: Gull Island is splendidly written and this hellish family will make your own kinfolk look a whole lot better. Even the in-laws.

The ice is barely off Georgian Bay when Jude Bogdan drives up from Toronto to the family cottage at Gull Island; at the request of her disappearing-into-dementia mother, she’s looking for her father’s will, he having vanished a few weeks before.

Jude is our first-person narrator, somewhere in her 30s, eking out a living by writing mysteries with an intrepid teenaged girl hero for the young adult market.

Jude drinks, a lot, the hard stuff chased by wine, she downs prodigious amounts; were the rest of us to try it, we’d be sick or unconscious and Jude would still be just warming up.

This is indeed a mystery — we spend the book inside Jude’s head as the tale slowly unravels, though to say whether it’s a murder mystery would be totally unfair.

Jude’s drinking, combined with her past and her present, raises serious doubts about whether we can trust what she’s telling us; she often can’t tell the difference between reality and inebriated hallucination and what we learn about the Bogdan family and their times together at the family cottage may have happened as Jude describes, or may have happened differently, or may not have happened.

The family is filthy rich. They lived until recently in Rosedale, the old-money, 19th-century mansions on quiet treed streets just north of downtown Toronto.

Jude’s mother never loved her and doesn’t like her now in those ever-rarer occasions that she’s in sync with the universe. An academic renowned in her day, mother always told Jude she was a failure and her books were trash. Yet it’s Jude she sends to look for the will.

The mother always preferred Gina, Jude’s younger obnoxious sister, who was never as good at doing anything as Jude. Gina, however, got married and had two kids, severely autistic William and his younger sister Mel. Husband Sammy still tries really hard to be accepted by the family and fails miserably.

Jude’s father, meanwhile, is a monster.

He was an architect who made a fortune without ever really designing anything. He claims he was a terrific salesman, seems to have a hand in getting things of questionable quality built for shady characters and made a killing on a development just north of Toronto that wouldn’t pass the sniff test if anyone took a closer look.

A cold, judgmental patriarch, he practiced emotional abuse — and occasionally physical abuse — on everyone in the family. There were plenty of other women. Her father liked to kill things — he illegally hunted endangered species overseas.

Eventually Jude’s father simply moved out of the cottage and into the adjoining guest cabin where no one else dared go. Even when he moved into a new home in Toronto with a younger woman, he still came to Gull Island.

Jude tells us all this as she slowly pokes into places in the cottage previously forbidden to her. She finds things, she hears noises, gulls and crows seem to be acting unnaturally hostile. Maybe.

She literally digs up things supposedly hidden by Gina that Jude can’t remember having been buried. Is there a ghost, or is it a bottle or two of scotch messing with Jude’s mind?

Porter ends chapters superbly with foreboding. There was a family tragedy — no details here — that gets a hint here and a hint there. An accident, we’re told. Perhaps something more. Perhaps something evil.

Oh yes, there was James, with whom Jude lived and who she kicked out when he got on her case too often about the booze. A really sharp accountant, James refused to curry favour by working for the father — refusing, perchance, to make two plus two equal whatever number the father wanted.

And just who was Eva, the mysterious woman who showed up in the parents’ wedding photos, who was sort of a friend of Jude’s mother and who seemed to come to the cottage an awful lot and to always be hovering?

We come to the awful realization that eventually Jude will have to go to the guest cabin that was her father’s domain — we just know something unspeakably ghastly awaits, but that Jude can’t stop herself from stumbling drunkenly down that path and that we can’t not follow inside her addled haunted head.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin reckons the book should not be judged on the author’s saying “going to the cottage” rather than “to the lake.” Well, okay, yeah, maybe it should be judged on that, but not too harshly.