They were left together in the cove then with its dirt-floored stud tilt, with its garden of root vegetables and its scatter of outbuildings, with its looming circle of hills and rattling brook and its view of the ocean's grey expanse beyond the harbour skerries. The cove was the heart and sum of all creation in their eyes and they were alone there with the little knowledge of the world passed on haphazard and gleaned by chance.
I love when an ARC opens with a note from the book's editor, giving some insider bit of info, and The Innocents begins with, “Years ago, in the archives, Michael Crummey found mention of a late eighteenth-century clergyman who had happened upon an adolescent brother and sister living all alone in an isolated cove off the northern coast of Newfoundland. When the clergyman approached the siblings to inquire into their circumstances, into how they were managing to survive, he was driven off the cove by the boy at gunpoint. The implications of that encounter would stay with Michael and eventually inspire The Innocents. In March of 2018, there were 1,500 words; by July, there were 90,000. I can't help but think the intensity of the novel's creation is reflected in the thing itself.” I quote Martha Kanya-Forstner at length here because that's all a prospective reader really needs to know: From the merest suggestion of a plot situation, Michael Crummey has dreamed up two fully-formed characters, bound by blood and the desperate quest for survival for which their parents never dreamed they'd so soon need to be fully prepared, and by richly describing their daily labour, and throwing in intermittent visits from outsiders that expand the siblings' understanding of the wider world, Crummey does right by history, literature, and the exploration of humanity. It's all here and it's all good. (Note: As I did read an ARC, passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Evered and Ada Best were approaching twelve and eleven, as near as it can be reckoned, when some illness carried off their parents one winter. (The parents are present for just enough at the beginning of the story to show what kind of world these children were raised in and to underline just what they lost.) All the two know of their circumstances is that every spring their father would row out to a schooner that anchors at the mouth of their cove to pick up provisions, and then row out again every fall to deliver the season's catch of cod, picking up their winter stores at that time. When The Hope appears as expected, Evered rows out and learns the truth of their situation: The yearly catch never quite covers the cost of the flour, peas, and molasses that their father would bring home, and being thus in debt to some faraway Mr. Strapp, his agent, “the Beadle”, must decide whether the youngster before him would be capable of bringing in a sufficient haul of cod, or whether he should send the two into service somewhere until they might clear their family's ledger of debt. Evered convinces the man to give them a season to prove themselves – likely because no one else would want to take over their “enterprise” with its remote, inhospitable curve of the rock and its sand-floored, drafty hut – and the siblings begin the back-breaking work of hand-fishing, preparing salt cod, hard-scrabble gardening, and the hundred other tasks of survival. Their catch is just decent enough to satisfy the Beadle when he returns again in the fall, but it's not nearly enough to touch the debt; and so the seasons and the years go by.
Crummey, being a noted poet as well as a novelist, is a master at selecting just the right words to describe the landscape and the atmosphere and the human heart (and I am always delighted by his obscure Newfoundlandisms; “a dwy of snow” and “my little blowsabella” sound like something out of The Jabberwocky to my ear). The work and the worries are so well captured, but we never forget that these are children; these are innocents: I smiled as they played games (and especially their invented “There's Your Answer”) and it broke my heart that a snatch of a drinking song that Evered overheard on board The Hope became the only song the siblings knew (small blessings, I guess, that they even found the one to fill a dark winter's evening). [Even more heartbreaking to learn that their inlet becomes known as Orphan Cove in the greater world: Everyone knows the siblings' situation and location and no one offers help?] And naturally, as time goes by and these children grow to adolescence, forces will see them growing closer and growing apart again:
It was a torment and a respite to be away from his sister, to escape the confines of time spent with someone he would have died for and could hardly manage to speak to anymore. All the days of his life he had been inclined to her orbit and he canted toward her still though she seemed as distant as the moon. Even when they were together in the tilt she sat somewhere out of reach. Where Ada was concerned he felt he was the blinder in their childhood game, reeving around sightless with his useless hands before his face.Between the setting's remoteness from civilisation and the richly selected language, The Innocents had a real Cormac McCarthyesque vibe that I savoured:
The sun had long set and the only light in the room was from the fire and Evered watched his sister in that darkling. Just able to make out her features though he could have touched her without moving from his seat. Her ebony ponytail only visible in motion, when she turned her head or tipped her face back to drain her mug. And he thought it was a genuine picture of Ada, that it was as true a sight as a person could hope to take of another in this life. That anything more was gossip and fairy tale, umbrage, wishful thinking.And, of course, “the innocents” conjures the Garden of Eden, and the infrequent visitors tempt a Fall with their Books of Knowledge, and how long should the pair stubbornly cling to their Paradise after being shown how inconsequential their spit of dirt is in the scheme of the whole wide world? Interior journeys are just as fraught as taking a leaky dory out onto the open ocean and challenges to one's innocence and ignorance are just as taxing as the hard labour of keeping a body going; and to think: It all started with that small nugget of inspiration and I believed every word of what Crummey has breathed into being.
The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:
Days by Moonlight by André Alexis
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta
Reproduction by Ian Williams
The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.
The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.
