Andrew Struthers, The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan

Long story short, because the story (blog post) did get long: I enjoyed Andrew Struthers' The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan a lot, particularly its rambling, endlessly distracted approach to narrative.

This memoir-ish book is full of characters that feel like Tofino, by which I mean both its stereotype and the people I've known from there. Genuinely, it's a window into the Tofino of 20 years ago that'll be familiar to those of us who've been around for a while, as well as an introduction for those who haven't.

There's a thread here, even if it's thoroughly buried under Struthers' constant digressions, vignettes, and history, but 20 years after the book's initial publication, readers will appreciate the digressions more than the thread anyway. The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan remains a worthy West Coast read, much more than many of the more earnest such books that came out in the early years of the century.

An unhelpfully long preamble

As I said to a friend and colleague this week, these days I'm often finding myself sputteringly angry because of All The Things.

My reputation is that I'm a calm person, chill, basically easygoing, but that's only ever been true on the outside. Unfairness, wilful ignorance, and malice in the world leave me wracked with all the predictable stress responses, mostly because I'm trying not to dwell in what amounts to anger, and also I'm often intensely anxious that things need to go smoothly.

At this point, the key trigger for me is AI, specifically LLM-style AI, and -- no. I'm not getting into that, because I've commented on that more than once here anyway.

My overall point is a simple one, namely that I'm rarely in a great frame of mind these days for reading. Escape isn't typically what I've gone to books for, although I've loved some things that others might think of as escapist (Jasper Fforde, for example), but I read hard, if you see what I mean. If I'm going to get everything out of a reading experience that I want to get, I do need to be able to grab quite intensely onto a book.

And so these days, it's on me, never the book, but I can't let go of my crankiness enough to grab onto a new book in the proper way. It's been terrific re-reading Rebecca Campbell's novella Arboreality in the company of my first-year class, and their excitement is giving me joy, but otherwise I'm not finding that I can give books what I want to give, what I'd normally give.

What does that mean for the Beer & Books book club, and in this case the next book I chose for the guys to read, namely Andrew Struthers' Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan?

Well, it means that I need to think directly about the books' sponsors, because I can read for the guys more easily than I can either for myself or for the books. I don't know that I would've felt better about either Percival Everett's prize-winning James or Shelby Van Pelt's best-selling Remarkably Bright Creatures, neither of which got a better reception from me (at this ugly point in that nation's history) for being unequivocally American, and also they struck me as more predictable than they should've been, but certainly it didn't help them.

This time, though, I'm the sponsor, Because I wasn't reading for someone else, I didn't have access to that inspiration, so to some extent I was kind of pre-reminiscing about the ways I should've felt about this book, and maybe it worked, but maybe not.

You may have realized by now that my in-head environment is a little weird.

(Unnecessary reminder: I blog for myself. Readers are welcome, but these posts are structured primarily to suit my working out of thoughts, not for a reader's convenience. Sorry, but also not sorry, and feel free to take it up with the management by posting a comment!)

But the book, briefly

My first encounter with Andrew Struthers was through his piece in the collection Way Out There: The Best of Explore Magazine, out of print now but still surviving in this mildly snarky Quill & Quire write-up.

At the time of its publication, I was teaching a second-year course in expository prose (oy) that its recently retired long-time instructor had always used as an undercover course in creative nonfiction. Mid-semester, some of the book's contributors got together for a reading at Robinson's Sports in downtown Victoria, so I went along and met Struthers and a few other writers (notably fellow North Coast Trail conqueror, and now longtime Beer & Books member, David Leach).

Anyway, it turns out that Struthers' contribution there was also a chapter in Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan, so this wasn't entirely a new read after all.

Struthers is a character, ask anybody who's ever met him. I don't doubt any of the variously hairy, wild, ill-advised, or romantic adventures outlined or gestured at in this book, even though it's more than likely that he's made up more than just the few stories explicitly flagged here as fictional. I mean, read his startled piece about his pseudo-NFB short film Spiders on Drugs, then watch the film, you'll see what I mean.

Around the same time Way Out There came out, I read Struthers' first book The Green Shadow, one of the early volumes in Rolf Maurer and Terry Glavin's excellent Transmontanus series. I wrote a few words about that book in this blog's early days, but looking back now, I'm surprised at myself. My memory of the book is much more positive than my blog post indicated it would be, and I've since recommended it to several people (and even bought myself an extra copy).

Like The Green Shadow, except maybe with fewer pseudonyms, Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan is an unmistakably Tofino book, and I mean that both in the best possible way and in some other ways as well. It's from the before times, before Tofino became a $300/night resort town, so to me it's irreplaceable. As I implied above, this book has retained a vitality that has faded from more earnest books of that time.

Do I wish, in some ways, that this book had gone differently? Yes, in some ways, and in that sense I don't disagree with Ken Hunt's mostly ungenerous review in Quill & Quire: Struthers often gets distracted, and he doesn't take us into the shadowlands of his own internal life (what Hunt called "using his intelligence to avoid discussing his emotional journey"), and I would've loved to read that other book. On the other hand, I don't think that Struthers would've been true to the book's inspiration and engine if he'd taken a more authoritative, self-controlling approach, and also Ken Hunt should've read more generously.

At the time of this book's writing, in sum, Struthers was basically a wild man leading a wild life, and the logical end product of the writing should always have been the shaggy, messy, picaresque, tall-tale-stuffed, somehow relatively short jungle of a book that's The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan.

If you're interested in time-travelling to the old Tofino and Ucluelet, and you're looking for a fellow traveller rather than a museum docent, you won't find many better options than Andrew Struthers and this book.

I wish I had more to say; I wish I felt a better reader right now. Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck AI, and the horse it rode in on.

Read books, by humans, from and about places that matter to you. If Vancovuer Island's west coast matters to you, spend time with notable human Andrew Struthers and The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan.