In place of the Consul and his estranged though loving wife moving toward violent death in Mexico in Under the Volcano (1947), Ethan and Jacqueline Llewelyn in October Ferry to Gabriola are about to be evicted from their British Columbia beach cabin.

Lowry intended the fear of eviction to overlie this book as he made the Consul's addiction to alcohol underlie Under the Volcano. The artistic problem is twofold: Llewelyn is a flawed figure from the start. He has been fleeing ghosts, real and imagined, all his life.

The real business of "the book is the charting of inner flights.

Ethan Llewelyn clearly qualifies as a Lowryan persona. Dispossessed of his Thoreauvian retreat, he has given up a lucrative law practice upon learning that the man he saved from the scaffold is indeed a murderer. The overt action, like that of Under the Volcano, takes place on a single...