They spoke of the days of plenty with a wistful exaggeration, as if it was an ancient time they knew only through stories generations old. My Jesus, the cod, the cod, the cod, that Crusade army of the North Atlantic, that irresistible undersea current of flesh, there was fish in galore one time. Boats run aground on a school swarming so thick beneath them a man could walk upon the very water but for fear of losing his shoes to the indiscriminate appetite of the fish.
ga•lore
[guh-lawr, -lohr]
adverb
in abundance; in plentiful amounts: food and drink galore.
Origin:
1660–70; < Irish go leor enough, plenty>
If the wistful nostalgia for the days of plenty, of fish galore, speaks of a real time, it's no wonder that the poor fishermen and their families, as well as the shrewd and shifty businessmen who would build whole communities from their labour, would have been lured from Europe to settle the barren and inhospitable coasts of Newfoundland. The novel Galore follows the intertwining of two such families, the Sellers and the Devines, the one rich and the other barely surviving, over six generations and two hundred years. When Devine's Widow (her actual name seems to have been lost to history) rejected the marriage proposal of King-me Sellers, they went on to found the two families that would make up the majority of the characters in this book. Portentously, Devine's Widow left King-me with a curse: May the sea take you and all the issue of your loins.
If ashes to ashes and dust to dust is the biblical way of the world, it follows naturally that in Newfoundland that which comes from the water will be returned to the water. The Widow is accused of being a witch, a perfectly reasonable assumption to the people of Paradise Deep, and takes her place alongside other fantastical creatures, such as mermaids, the Little People of the woods, a mute albino delivered live from the belly of a whale, and more than one tangible ghost. A doctor who joins the community on a two year contract, and ends up staying forever, seems equally intrigued and repulsed by what he initially finds: He felt at times he'd been transported to a medieval world that was still half fairy tale. In many ways, the day to day lives of the locals wasmedieval, little changed from a subsistence life from centuries before.
Michael Crummey shows great affection for the inhabitants of this lost world, and if I have a complaint, it might be that he's a bit too gentle with them. Certainly there are unlikeable characters in this book, murderers and philanderers and misers and fools, but none of them really came off the page for me. A true story: I have a friend who married a Newfoundlander, whose own father was a fisherman in a coastal community of less than two hundred people, fifty and more years after Galore concludes. This man was away on the fishing boats most of the time but when he was home, he was a mean and abusive drunk who forced himself on his long-suffering wife, eventually siring fourteen children by her. The woman was so overwhelmed, barely able to care for and feed the ever growing brood, essentially all alone, and she went to the parish priest for advice. The priest called down all the wrath of God upon her head for daring to complain about her lot in life and impressed on her that her only duty as a wife was to submit to her husband. And this was in the mid to late twentieth century. Yet, in Galore, not one character seems as real to me as my friend's father-in-law, whom she never met, and about whom she has only broadly sketched. Even the clergy in Galore, while gently ridiculed, are presented as benign-- they may behave unclergylike, especially the Catholic priest, but all of them are ultimately interested in the salvation of their parishioners.
I did like this bit about the doctor's experiences, and what it says about the Newfies:
The patients he saw were virtually incapable of articulating their troubles, offering only the broadest, most childish descriptions of what ailed them. I finds me sides, they told him. I finds me legs. I got a pain up tru me, they said. Bad head, bad back. Bad stomach, which sometimes meant trouble breathing. Even under questioning they had difficulty presenting specific symptoms, which made them sound like a crowd of hypochondriacs, but it was rare to root out a malingerer. People on the shore were unable to distinguish illness or injury from the ordinary strain and torment of their days until they were crippled and it was only the desperate who braved the clinic, and only after they'd exhausted every quack potion and home remedy available.
After the bleakness and hard labour of generations of fishermen, Crummey offers rescue in the form of a union organizer:
He had the rhythm and demeanor of a preacher, the same bluff assurance. He began with an overview of the sad facts of a fisherman's life, the deplorable conditions they lived and worked in, the parasites in St. John's who bled them dry. A sycophantic tone to the presentation that made the men restless, the grievances so familiar they could have rhymed them off in their sleep. But Croaker paused at the end of the list, breeding anticipation with his silence, and they all leaned slightly forward in their pews. --You people, he said finally. He pointed with his sausage fingers. Grovellers, he called them. They were living the same miserable lives their fathers lived and their fathers' fathers before them. The wealth of the nation made on their backs and every one of them content to beg at Levi Sellers' door. They were backward and illiterate and happy to leave their children no hope of a better life.
What I found most illuminating about this speech is how it contrasts with the experience that Susanna Moodie describes inRoughing It In The Bush. To Moodie, emigrating and homesteading in Upper Canada was a very hard and rough life, but after years of work, one could survey the cleared land, the improved soil, the comfortable living one has eked out and then pass it all on to one's children, who would not have to labour as hard themselves. There seems a point to the sacrifices. But in coastal Newfoundland, the point for generations was to merely survive.
And the bit that seems to summarise the whole plot, when the doctor hints at euthanasia to his wife who lies dying of cancer:
Bride offering the slightest nod. --Now the once, she said.
It was the oddest expression he'd learned on the shore. Now the once. The present twined with the past to mean soon, a bit later, some unspecified point in the future. As if it was all the same finally, as if time was a single moment endlessly circling on itself. Bride forever absent and always with him.
And so the generations were come to an end: those descendants of Devine's Widow and King-me Sellers who are not dead by the end of the book are never heard from again after leaving for the States, taken by the sea as surely as if they had drowned in it.
I didn't love this book, and for a poet, Michael Crummey rarely wowed me with poetical language, so it's a solid three stars for me. I have a thing for Newfie stories, and a preference for those told by Newfies themselves (*cough* sorry Annie Proulx *cough*) and will happily continue to mine the genre.
