Harold Macy, San Josef

 In the big picture, hardly anyone ever goes to northern Vancouver Island, where Harold Macy set his terrific 2019 novel San Josef. Sure, plenty of folks camp at San Josef Bay, or hike the North Coast Trail, or visit the lighthouse at Cape Scott, but people from elsewhere think it’s basically empty space.

Hansen Lagoon at San Josef, by Rick McCharles: visit his pics!

I’m not sure that that’s why the area has shown up serendipitously for me lately in four separate books that have fallen into my net, but empty places on the map do have a “here be monsters” aura to them that generates all sorts of fictions: Emily St. John Mandel in Sea of Tranquillity, Brian Preston in the very different Stag, and Bruce Burrows in The Fourth Betrayal, being the others. Of the four, Macy’s San Josef gives readers the best access to the place, and with all due respect to Mandel, is also the closest to classic realist fiction, in the best possible way.

Though it reaches back and forth across the decades on either side, San Josef is grounded in 1898, when the small intentional community there (Danish, more or less communist, or at least cooperative) was already foundering. Into the labour and anxiety, and into the family at the community’s heart, wanders Clayton Monroe, an older American bearing with him the scars and shadows of the US Civil War.

I’ve been to San Josef, but I don’t know it at all well. The other side of the north island is where I’ve spent much more time, over the decades, but the whole place is all a bit notional rather than known to me, if you see what I mean.

Reading San Josef, though, gave me the sense that I was coming to know the place along with Macy’s characters. It’s rare in reading fiction that I feel so deeply immersed in physical places, even though I’ve often taught courses about place and about fiction that’s tied to place. I don’t know that I’ll ever find a way to teach this book, or indeed if its aesthetics would work for the kinds of students who tend to enroll in my classes, but oh, for some readers, San Josef will be an absolute joy.

The acknowledgements section gives some clues about that, because it’s a veritable murderer’s row of top-flight BC writers: Jack Hodgins (who blurbs it), Gary Geddes, Bill Valgardson, Tom Wayman, and Steven Price.

If you need to get away from the here and now, and honestly, who doesn’t need that, you won’t find much better than this novel.

(Cross-posted from my Substack: long story)