Sweetland ~ by Michael Crummey

It is almost Halloween, and if you are looking for a book about ghosts, this is one for you.  But you won't find any horror here, just humanity laid bare, like the rocks along the lonely Newfoundland coastline; love and loss, life and death, the bountiful and the barren, side by side.

This is a book of two parts; the first describes in microscopic detail life on Sweetland Island: the topography, the characters, the weather and the whinnying refrigerator.  Alive, alive, this book is a breathing living thing. It is because the first half is so real, and we have come to know the intricacies of the lives lived there, that the second half of the book is so powerful.  It is as if we step from the real world, into some misty unreality, though that description is not quite right.  The world is half real, half out of memory, but seeming all the more vibrant and vital as a result.  

When your life is touched by those who are suffering from mental illness, every experience is coloured by it.  The last time  read King Lear, it was about a proud old man, but this time, since my mother diagnosed with Alzheimer's, it has become clear to me that the play is about a man suffering from Alzheimer's.  It was the same with this novel. Surely this is a book about a man, Moses Sweetland,  losing his reason; a man slowly slipping into madness, succumbing to the memory loss (or gain, depending on your point of view) associated with old age.  In a way, this book is not very unlike 'The Buried Giant' by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I reviewed during the summer, which deals with memory and the power of forgetting: they certainly make fine companion books.
In terms of plt, this is a story about a island closing down.  The residents are being paid by the government to leave, the only codicil is that all must go.  Sweetland does not want to leave, and so his neighbours and friends pressure him to take the government package.  You must read it yourself to earn what happens.

One adorable character that we meet is Jessie, the young, Autistic boy who speaks regularly to his deceased great-uncle Hollis, though he is not the only ghost that haunts the island.  As in his earlier (fantastic) novel, 'Galore', Crummey presents us with the semi-comforting idea that ghosts walk beside us in life.  Once again, I was reminded of my mother, speaking of recent conversations she'd had with long deceased relatives.  Yet when Crummey writes it, it isn't unsettling or strange.  It feels natural, possible, plausible.
And this is probably why it is so difficult to finish this book and to leave the world that Crummey has created behind: there is a plain comfort in the frill-free, simple world he describes.  I find that I had to begin to re-read it instantly on turning the final page because the loss of the world, with interwoven lives, and colourful characters, was pretty unbearable.  Perhaps this is Crummey's greatest achievement: he makes us mourn the passing of a world that is all but disappeared except between the pages of a history book, or in the memories of the very old.  As such, Crummey is an archivist, a collector of memories, a Lady Gregory of our times!

But  the entire premise is debatable, questionable even: Is Moses Sweetland just a man with a vivid imagination, someone who has been alone too long, or is he actually losing his grip on reality? 

There is something heroic, and noble about the man, a John Wayne of sorts in his ruggedness.  He is the one they rely on to fix thing, sort things out.  Yet he has made mistakes and has regrets, and these are the thing that haunt him in the second half of the book.

We are fearful that he won't leave the island, the threats are growing evermore serious, but we are more terrified that he will leave.  How can the man leave when his very name  is intertwined with the land under his feet.  He is the island, the island is him.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons that we come to care so much about this character; because we have come to are so much about the place, each colouring the other until they become synonymous with the book's title.
Michael Crummey should be given some sort of national award: he is done so much for tourism.  This book had me Googling flights to Newfoundland and pricing holiday homes in St John's, though I don't know if I would ever find much of  Sweetland's world in modern day Newfoundland.  It seemed too alien for Sweetland himself, though it would still be worth looking for.   

Halloween or no, this book must be read and reread, for one reading will not be enough.  It will leave you heartbroken at the loss of it; the brutal landscape of the Mackerel Cliffs, the dogged tenacity of Moses Sweetland, and its people, ghostlike, yet all the more real for that. 

By Michelle Burrowes

Galore ~ by Michael Crummey

If it were possible for a book to have a taste, then 'Galore', by Michael Crummey, would taste of salt water.  Every page is dripping with it: steeped as it is in the noise,and vitality of the sea. And what could be more fitting in a story about an isolated community on the island of Newfoundland some two hundread years or more ago.  It is difficult to tell when exatly the story is set, as the action occurs out of time and place, as we know it.  There is a blurring of reality and fantasy: a place where ghosts dwell amongst the living, where fishermen fall for mermaids, and where full-grown men are re-born from the guts of a whale.  As such, Crummey has based his book on a wonderful series of "what if's".  What if such a thing were possible?  What if Jona was actually swollowed by a whale, as the bible tells us.  And what would the reaction be if, one day, Jona were thrown up on a beech, in a place and time where superstitions were powerful motivators in society.  For the story of Jona - known here as Judah- is at the heart of this novel and immediately we are enthralled with the desire to finally learn of the fate of the character who for so long lived in our childhood imagination.  Like some sort of Boo Radley from the distant past, we yearn to know Judah's story and to learn what secrets lie behind those pale blue eyes. Indeed, the very first line of the book tells us the fate of Judah.  'He ended his time on the shore...'  To speak of endings at the very beginning of this tale is not enough for the reader and spurs us on to learn more.  Indeed, as time goes on, it becomes less and less acceptable that the narrator was telling us the truth in that first line.  In the world of Newfoundland superstition, even the rules of narrative fiction cannot be taken as gospel.  
Yet, there are other biblical echoes throughout this novel.  We see Mary Tryphena and Absolom Sellers sitting in Kerrivan's tree together  They are cousins, forbidden to fall in love. He takes an apple and passes it to Mary to take a bite and their fates are sealed. Similarities with the story of Adam and Eve are unmistakeable here.  Indeed, we find our very own Cain and Abel chracters, in the sons of Absolom Sellers, and something of Noah's tale in the slow building of the huge boat, that will ultimatley save the community from certain extinction. 
But it would be a mistake to limit the achievement of this novel to that of a modern re-telling of Old Testament stories.  This novel is so much more than that.  It's characters are revealled to us like a soul of a sinner is exposed in the confessional.  We learn about them from the inside out: given only the slightest hint about external appearances, but shown detailed accounts of the innermost desires and passions.  Like Joyce and Woolf, Crummey takes a light and shows us the inner-workings of his characters's minds.  We feel we know each character intimately, by the colours found within; the hue of their souls.  It is owing to such characterisation that we feel so bereft at the passing of each generation.  It is heart-wrenching to say goodbye to the knowlegde and wisdom of each character; their stories, their pain, their secrets.  Indeed, this feeling is best expressed by Devine's Widow, a natural-born witch if ever there was one, who says, 'She felt like she was being erased from the world, one generation at a time, like sediment sieved out of water through a cloth.'  It is no surprise to learn that Crummey is a fine poet  as well as an author of fine books. Yet the story belies such thoughts and actually reveals the cyclical pattern of lives and how one generation merges into another, with family traits being passed down through the family line.  There are patterns to be found and comparisons to be drawn.
The tell-tale sign of the poet is also apparent in the purity of the text.  Crummey writes of a world laid bare, without embellishment, with scant respect for the rules of language, reflected in the lack of punctuation in his writing.  Apostrophies highlighting dialogue are seen as unnecessary trimmings that are at odds with this tale of bare essentials, of life lived among the elements.  As such, Crummey's prose style is akin to the beauty of drift wood: rugged, stark and at times crude, but so steeped in narrative history, that it cannot help but be valued and higly prized.  This is a must read novel, for anyone who ever imagined 'what if', or  who simply ever imagined.  With 'Galore' you will be left with the taste of the salt -water in your mouth and gritty sand between your teeth, a pleasure truly not to be missed.