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.

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.

The Starving Published on Kindle

Cover for The Starving,
from a photo I took in the Everglades

I've written previously about my short story, "The Starving," and my attempts to have it published. I finally took the matter into my own hands and self-published using Amazon.com's Digital Text Platform (DTP).

My journey to publishing on DTP started with receiving a Kindle-2 for Christmas last year (it seems like only yesterday that it was 2009). I really like the device, and find reading on it better in many ways than reading a hard cover or paperback book. One big advantage is that you don't have to hold pages open, so you can sit and eat lunch and read -- "look ma, no hands!" Of course the main advantage is being able to carry thousands of books around with you wherever you go -- books you buy much cheaper. This can be a big deal for folks like Peace Corps Volunteers, missionaries, foreign service workers, and the cruising class.

You can read a good critique of the Kindle -2 in the Linux Journal.

Publishing on DPT is covered well on Amazon.com's web site here. Obviously, you have to have an Amazon.com account. Anyone who has purchased a book or anything else (e.g., a Kindle) through Amazon.com already has one. It helps to know a little HTML, but since DTP converts your files to HTML and lets you preview the result before publishing, it's not a big issue.

Go ahead, try it!