Crown-sanctioned
scroungers.
Out of foreign ports.
Overseas.
To vanquish.
God's country.
New Found Land.
Beneath a crow-wing flap
of a flag.
Of unholy bone-gnawers:
Piecemeal progress.
Who from where?
At 848 pages, Blackstrap Hawco is many books, not just in length, but in tone and style and subject and theme, and taken all together, this is a rare book that deserves the label "masterpiece" in every sense of the word.
Blackstrap Hawco can be divided into more or less two halves: the first skipping around the history of four generations of Hawcos, using the various first-person voices of the characters that each chapter focuses on; and the second half is a linear account of the title character, told in a third-person-omniscient style, and overlapping the timeline from the first section wherever Blackstrap was present. What links the two is the history and folklore of Newfoundland and Blackstrap's position as a near mythological character; the last true Newfoundlander; an indomitable force who is present at all the significant historical events that occur within his late twentieth to early twenty-first century lifespan. The first chapters can be in a halting, choppy style:
A man's bulky presence. Charging up behind. Out of sight. Muttering something. Reciting words. And her scream. Brought upon itself. Shrill. Alert. Coming to her from somewhere else. Deep inside.Or in a stream-of-consciousness, without capital letters or periods (this example is not quite half of one paragraph):
shab reardon bellowed, his greyish-white hair combed neatly with the grease of brylcream, his stout face that of a handsome, charismatic man, gone bad from drink and a heritage of brutality, a guttural howl in the name of some forefather's forefather, down the line of ramshackle midnight terror suffered by their children and their children and theirs, usually a quiet, meek soul, a man who drank and brooded alone for hours, watching where his hands were set against the table, meant to be left alone while studying his glass and thinking on self-shaped shadows…And in one of the last chapters, the following is the writing style used for a fifth generation Hawco, a modern day teenager:
He tears opN d padded Nvelop n pulls ot a thik bunch of folded sheets of ppr. There's also an old b%k. myt B wrth somit. He stands der n opens d b%k. d ppr r yellO. Old. d wrds r ritN ot n old styl rytN.More than anything, Blackstrap Hawco is a book of atmosphere, with many characters who are mentally ill, or haunted, or otherwise disengaged from their own lives, and it makes for a consistently uncomfortable read. The history of the Hawco family is the purported premise, but with rapes and secret adoptions and questionable paternities, it's unclear if there's any continuity in the bloodline from one generation to the next. And characters don't want to learn their family history: journals are burned, letters returned, leads are not followed. When an old woman in Toronto promises to tell Blackstrap the legend of the screaming woman who was pregnant for thirteen months, he doesn't even realise that's the story of his own great-grandmother; and yet, that might be a relationship in name only, and a made up name at that.
And Newfoundland itself is captured so well here; the land, its people, its ghosts. I've read other books that mention The Ocean Ranger disaster or William Croaker or Christmas Eve mummers, and I've read other books that encompass the modern history of Newfoundland , but I've never experienced these things as I have here through the person of Blackstrap Hawco; the man who can't be killed. There's sealing and cod-jigging, moose on the highway, hauling loads of spruce out of the interminable forests, and while women cook the bread in wood fired ovens and have their babies in their own beds, the men die, or drown, or disappear into the legendary black sea (which are three different events). The water, water, is everywhere, and while it provides sustenance, it is also the constant threat that surrounds the island:
Water gushes aboard. Weather cut from chaos takes the space. A snatch of a million fleeting razors. The freezing ocean as water and wind. The blast in the face. Skin and bones dead in seconds. The chewing howl. Eyes frozen fully shut. And the boat sinks. The men are in the water. Arms and legs useless to swim. They sink. Silently, they give in. Men gone from themselves.Author Kenneth J. Harvey took fifteen years to write Blackstrap Hawco, and throughout, he writes as though the assembled stories come from actual diaries, interviews, and historical documents related to the Hawcos. As with any good yarn, there's enough verifiable in this story to make a reader want to believe in the possibility of an actual Blackstrap, but this final paragraph in the afterword extends the author's literary manoeuvring:
The (transcomposite) method of writing has been employed so that, as the years rise toward the actual year (2042) when the author is committing these words to paper, more and more of what has been recorded in this book will align with plausibility. In fact, there is only one day in which the underlying premise of this book becomes sound -- January 22, 2042. On any other day, this book simply is not.So what to make of all that, b'y? This book was long, and at times tedious, and I was often uncomfortable and confused. But it's all in here; everything a person wants to feel in order to understand the Newfie heart, and upon reflection, it couldn't have been told any other way.
*****
This book even mentions Galt as a town where many of the Newfoundlanders left for, and as that was a precursor to where I live, and as I have met many fine Newfies here, this must have been more of a hotspot for them than I even realised. As our other large self-identifying group here is Portuguese, and as Blackstrap's confrontation with the illegal Portuguese trawling ship within Newfoundland's 200 mile nautical border is a major plot point, that's interesting to me that these are the the two main "cultural" groups in town.
