"Galore: A Novel" (Other Press, 338 pages, $15.95) is a grand multi-generational romp of a tale about the "pigheaded," superstitious and haunted folk inhabiting the fictitious outport of Paradise Deep, Newfoundland. As they try to wrest a living fishing for cod, the Sellers and the Devine families intermarry, carry out odd rituals, hold onto grudges, keep secrets and struggle with the elements that batter their isolated village far from St. John's and the Ireland or West Country England that spawned them. In native Newfoundlander Michael Crummey's spellbinding third novel, there are dreams, curses and spectral visions galore.
Crummey's language is poetic, lush, full of colorful dialect, studded with verbs like "juddered" and "yaffled"; adjectives like "fousty" and "kipped down," and nouns like "shagger," "stawkins" and "gommel," which in context work wonderfully well, despite their unfamiliarity to American ears.
His meandering narrative, encompassing the early 18th century to the end of World War I, moves from past to present and loops back around again in the space of a paragraph. At the novel's beginning we learn what's happened to the mute albino who was pulled from the gut of a whale a lifetime ago. Then we circle back to the details of that fateful long-ago St. Mark's feast day when the Widow Devine plunged her knife into the leviathan that had beached itself on the shore, freeing the "Great White" man who, for a time at least, brought prosperity to the "livyers" ("live heres") of the remote coastal community on "the rock."
In addition to the many offshoots of the Devines and the Sellerses, we meet the lusty itinerant priest, Father Phelan, who warms the bed of Mrs. Virtue Gallery, while her dead husband, a murderer, stands watch by the fireplace. And there's the American surgeon Harold Newman, who signs on for two years' service in this primitive place to escape his father's expectations of him, and ends up staying a lifetime, falling in love with the insistent young woman who'd come to have him extract all her teeth, sound as well as decayed.
This is a book to savor. You won't want to miss any of its delights: the tightly braided narrative skeins, the pathos and humor of the characters, the exotic flavor of a long ago time and place where everything "seemed too severe and formidable, too provocative, too extravagant and harrowing to be real." In this odd, hermetic world, the Widow Devine's granddaughter tells Dr. Newman that the only thing life offers is "the right to say yes or no to love."
First published in Canada in 2009, "Galore" won many honors, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in 2010.
Kathryn Lang is former senior editor at Southern Methodist University Press. On her father's side, she is descended from hardy Newfoundland stock; some of her forebears fished for cod from the outport of Aqua Fort.
