Galore, by Michael Crummey

"The white underbelly was exposed where the carcass keeled to one side, the stomach's membrane floating free in the shallows...dirty seawater pouring from the gash they opened, a crest of blood, a school of undigested capelin and herring, and then the head appeared..."

Michael Crummey has, in his novel Galore (Doubleday, 2009) created a cast of characters too real to be fictitious. Then, just to show his hand at legerdemain, he throws into the mix a man cut from the belly of whale and another who dies only to reappear falling through the roof of his ex-wife's house. Indeed, Mr. Crummey, what sort of voyage are we on?!

It is a voyage of discovery, as all should be. Galore is another of Crummey's historical Newfoundland narratives full of families, fish, and fantasy woven into a rich fabric whose threads tie the reader to the land and its inhabitants. At times lyrical, at others matter of fact in the description of the islanders' poverty and want and their altogether tragic circumstances, Galore is a tale of lives lived, of a place and a time and of love and loss.

Galore’s tales are told from the perspective of people who live in the ‘real’ world but who experience a different reality from the one we call objective. The ghost in Galore is not a fantasy or superstition, but a manifestation of the reality of people who believe in and have "real" experiences of Mr. Gallery; people who walk along the Tolt Road with him, and sit at the hearth with him and discuss what is to be done -- him dead all those years.

Then there is the Widow Devine -- "Her Christian name passed out of use in the decades after her husband was buried and only a handful could even remember what it was" -- who seems invested with supernatural powers. Granted, we see nothing explicit to convince us that she is responsible for the cures or the curses attributed to her, but there are too many 'coincidences.'

Most of Newfoundland was settled almost exclusively by people from a small corner of south-eastern Ireland and another small corner of south-western England. They universally lead a mean existence but despite their common deprivations, manage to retain their religious affiliations and animosities. They may be in the same boat literally and figuratively, but when the fog rolls in and the wind howls like a banshee, and the Grand Banks seem haunted more by the spirits of the dead than by the cod upon which these mendicants of nature depend, then the fishermen pray to their own god, and once back on shore, they build their own churches and burn down their neighbors'.

What makes Crummey's novels about Newfoundlanders (he has written three) so compelling is his clear connection to the land and its people, and his obvious empathy, even distress, in seeing their deprivations, and the depredations visited upon them by both man and nature. Those mean circumstances continue to this day; the cod is gone, and "now the once" the oil will be gone, too. And the people of Newfoundland will be back where they started. Just as the characters and their stories are in this captivating novel.

Started Reading "Galore," by Michael Crummey

Devine's Widow tells Father Phelan, You'd be a half-decent priest if you gave up the drinking and whoring.


Half-decent, he said, wouldn't be worth the sacrifice.

Father Phelan was, of course, Catholic, and prior to 1784, the practice of the Catholic Religion was illegal in Newfoundland.

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.

Sweetland, by Michael Crummey

The steel mill was a city unto itself. Massive coke ovens, storage tanks and elevators, engine rooms, stock houses the size of city churches, miles of train tracks and gas lines and elevated piping that criss-crossed the blackened acres. Cooling stations, smoke and creosote and slag, the molten glow of the pour-offs at the open hearths like some evangelical's vision of hell. Everything was in motion, cranes and railcars, conveyor belts shifting ore pellets to the blast furnaces, coal cars shuttling from the battery to the ovens, sheets of heated strip steel rolling through rotating cylinders. All of it seemed to be moving at cross purposes and the unremitting noise of the place was a physical thing, hammering against them. The air heated and condensed, packed with dust and steam and a nauseating chemical sweat. Men darting among the machinery like rats, their faces grimed with soot.

This is Michael Crummey's vivid description of the mill that his protagonist, Moses Sweetland, works in with his friend, Duke Fewer, when the two young men go to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, to find work. In Crummey's novel, 'Sweetland,' Moses and his friend can barely eke out a subsistence existence where they live on the island by the same name, Sweetland, in Newfoundland. Every other inhabitant (90 in all) of the small town is in the same boat (no pun intended), as a result of the moratorium on cod fishing imposed by the Canadian government in 1992. The moratorium was forced by over fishing and the resulting collapse of the once-plentiful fish stock.

Crummey's writing has been described in glowing terms, but as "spare lyricism" (the St John's Telegram). I guess I don't know what spare means in this sense. I see his descriptions of place, as in the steel mill above, as rich, fulsome (in the best sense), and evocative. Crummey is an award-winning poet, and his prose employs a variety of poetic devices, such as the parataxis demonstrated in the steel mill paragraph. He's able to do this without getting caught at it. One simply stops reading and exclaims, 'What a wonderful description,' or 'How well put,' or just says nothing and simply sits back and imagines being there, under a threatening sky, "a scudding wind kicking a lop on the water high enough to spit over the gunwale...soaked with ocean spray...face rimed with salt."

Crummey's story is about the disappearance of a way of life and it reflects, as any good story does, reality for Newfoundland's tiny coastal communities of fishermen and their kin. It revolves around the resettlement program implemented by the government of Canada. Families were offered a considerable amount of money to resettle to designated "growth areas." The sticking point in Crummey's novel was that all families had to agree (in actuality, the stipulation was that 80 to 90 percent of families had to agree). The government made it clear that once resettlement was completed, services would be cut off. In 'Sweetland,' we find the one hold out, Moses Sweetland, stranded in Chance Cove after he agrees to leave, then disappears as the government ferry is loaded.

Why does Moses Sweetland stubbornly refuse to leave the hardscrabble existence that he and others in the community endure? Perhaps it's because of the experience he had working in the steel mill, an experience that scarred him for life, physically and emotionally. Perhaps it's because who is, who he sees himself as being, is so tightly wound up with the concept of place that leaving is simply inconceivable. He is as much rooted to the land as the gnarled and tangled stands of stunted spruce and balsam fir -- the tuckamore -- anchored to the rock, weathered into swept-back, sculptural shapes by harsh coastal growing conditions.

Sweetland will not leave the island, but the island will leave him. Crummey doesn't lecture about climate change. He simply tells his story, and in his story, dead, emaciated birds wash up on shore. "Dozens of bullbirds dead in the water, the corpses like tiny bouys off their moorings and drifting past the breakwater...hundreds more of them on the surface beyond the breakwater, floating dead. The birds so delicately calibrated they'd starved within hours of each other, the organs shutting down one at a time." Sweetland realizes that these birds, these fish, these places are, "relics of another time and on their way out."

At some primal level, Sweetland understands that he too, is a relic. That, "There was a new world being built around him." Listening to the Fisheries Broadcast, he heard about, "apocalyptic weather, rising sea levels, alterations in the seasons, in ocean temperatures. Fish migrating north in search of colder water and the dovekies lost in the landscape they were made for. The generations of instinct they'd relied on to survive here suddenly useless."

In the end, I was left sad by the story. Sad for the plight of the people. Sad for the suffering. Their diminishment. Sad to realize that for many, perhaps most, their resettlement will not bring happiness, but simply another sort of suffering by virtue of an alienation that an indoor toilet can't assuage. Sad for the loss of a way of life. But I realize, as well, that I feel as if I've come to know these people, and I will miss them.