Galore: A Novel

Galore indeed! Michael Crummey pours out his magical, ribald fiction like a bumper catch on the deck of a trawler: proliferating, pungent, and alive. His setting is the isolated fishing community of Paradise Deep, somewhere on the Newfoundland coast in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a hard life, the seamen dependent on uncertain harvests to tide them through long and cruel winters, holing up in rough wooden tilts. Births are frequent; deaths more frequent still. Marriages (or at least couplings) occur sometimes for love, but often out of desperation or animal need, and in one case to keep an innocent man from the gallows -- for authority is a flexible thing in these parts.If this wild sprawl of a book is about any one thing, it is about the forces that hold a primitive community together or tear it apart. Official law resides in the person of the magistrate and principal landowner King-Me Sellers, (so called for his prowess at checkers). He heads the English Protestant community; the other half of the population are Irish-speaking Catholics. Neither group has a church. The Catholics benefit from the occasional blessings of Father Phelan, an itinerant priest whose lust for life is by no means confined by vows of temperance or chastity. The Protestants make do with services held by Jabez Trim, owner of the only Bible in the place, a partially-destroyed specimen salvaged from a shipwreck. But folk superstition is at least as powerful as religion. This is a village whose true sacraments are celebrated at a sacred tree, where masked mummers make licensed havoc at Christmas, and where the regular appearance of a recent ghost is accepted as a matter of course. In many ways, the real power is held by the Widow Devine, an aged Irish medicine woman (or witch, depending on your point of view). She will pass most of her powers to her granddaughter, Mary Tryphena, who will wield a similar but less dominant force in the second part of the book.As in Jane Urquhart's magnificent  AWAY , a book of greater discipline but similar scope, the action begins mysteriously with an apparently dead man being pulled from the sea, or in this case cut like Jonah from the belly of a beached whale. Unnaturally pale, fishily pungent, and totally mute, the inhabitants shun and fear him -- only to treat him like a prophet when he reveals the talismanic ability of drawing shoals of fish to his boat. Crummey will end almost a century later with another reference to the story of Jonah and the whale, but this second book-end only shows how the novel has disintegrated in between. Paradoxically so, because most of the new forces that arrive have at least the outward aim of organization: an Anglican minister and proper Catholic priest whose charge will be to separate their communities from one another, a new scion of the Sellers family who will force most of the fishermen into his debt, crooked politicians elected to the Newfoundland Assembly, a union organizer, fiery yet flawed. But the mystic soul of the village has mostly gone, glimpsed only in fitful traces as the descendants of Widow Devine move into the sixth generation. After a while, as the characters proliferate, you care less and less about their lives as individuals. Perhaps this was Crummey's point? A sad one, if so -- but that first part is magnificent.

"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.

Having visited Newfoundland a while ago, I was quite intrigued by this book. It was a bit different from what I expected, but read to the end and sort off enjoyed it. Hard really to describe it, but really well written.

Michael Crummy writes in a style that is both entertaining and educational. His descriptions and use of a dialect that is unique to Newfoundland and a time long gone. All of his books acknowledge the ties to England and the fishing industry of centuries ago. An entrancing read !!!

Wow, what an adventure this story (these stories!) is! It's amazing to learn, while also being immensely entertained, the rich history that is not so hidden, but rather available for the taking right here, in your own backyard, so to speak. Crummy's writing style is just so endearing -- very much reflective of the charming qualities of the Newfoundland people. What a treat this novel is! The great, unknown Canadiana.

I read all Crummey's novels and they are all very good, but this is a masterpiece. So much goes on it is impossible to summerise. A century of Irish folklore, of inexplicable events, of love and hate and everything in between, of misery and courage with Newfoundland as an implacable backdrop caracter in itself. A grand novel from a great Canadian writer.

I love a story that has a little bit of magic. Also, the fact that it’s about Newfoundland makes it better.