River Thieves, by Michael Crummey

River Thieves, by Michael Crummey
Review by Jem Poster, The Guardian
October 11, 2002

This is a novel with a vast epic sweep, a tale of racial conflict set against the harsh and beautiful backdrop of Newfoundland in the early 19th century. John Peyton and his ageing father set their traps and fishing lines in a country whose native inhabitants, the Beothuk, have been driven to the verge of extinction by the activities both of the European settlers and the neighbouring Mi'kmaq tribe. The narrative centres on one incident, the murder of two Beothuk men by a raiding party which includes the two Peytons.

It's an unsettling tale, not least because of its author's admirable refusal either to moralise or to simplify. There's a telling ambiguity in the very title: are the "river thieves" the raiding Beothuk - the embattled warriors who steal traps, destroy salmon nets and at one point plunder the Peytons' loaded boat - or the usurping settlers, pillaging native dwellings and burial sites as they move clumsily through a land they can never honestly call their own?

One of the settlers, Reilly, has in fact been transported to Newfoundland after a misspent early life as a river thief on the Thames, and it's through this shadowy but important figure that Crummey most fruitfully explores the complex patterns of possession and dispossession that run through the novel as a whole.

Doubly displaced as an Irish Londoner exiled from England, Reilly is in some respects the counterpart of the frightened and bewildered Beothuk girl whom Peyton remembers being exhibited on a tavern table during his own childhood in England. Yet at the same time he is, of all the settlers, the one most truly at home in the wilderness: married to a Mi'kmaq woman and on reasonable terms with his Beothuk neighbours, he seems to hint at the possibility of some more humane and accommodating existence. But then - and it's in such twists that the novel's unsentimental realism is most strikingly apparent - he is crucially, if not entirely culpably, implicated in the murder.

Woven in with this bleak account of displacement and genocide is another, more intimate story involving Cassie, initially taken on by the elder Peyton as his son's tutor and now housekeeper to the two men. Shy, inexperienced and hampered by the belief that Cassie may actually be his father's lover, Peyton struggles variously to suppress and to articulate his own slow-burning passion for her. But Cassie's reasons for staying in the house are darker and more complicated than he can possibly guess, and this strand of the narrative offers only the chilliest of resolutions.

"Tilt" -- primative shelter used by early trappers in Newfoundland

Crummey has a sharp eye for detail and an often breathtaking lucidity of expression, and much of the novel's power derives from his skilful delineation of his chosen territory. Snowflakes shining like flint-sparks as they drift through the firelight, the play of shadows on the wall of a makeshift tent, the pressure of icy water against a swan-skin cuff as Peyton works wildly to free a man dragged beneath broken ice - such details bring us sharply into contact with a land which the law-enforcer and map-maker Buchan disturbingly conceives of as "devoid of any suggestion of design."

Crummey's attention to detail isn't invariably rewarding: occasionally the narrative flow is clogged by inert catalogues and tediously precise statistics. But the overriding impression from this novel is of a remarkably gifted writer working with passion and imagination as he recreates the interplay of vanished human lives in a spectacularly inhuman environment.