“I c-curse—I c-curse them greedy bastards,” he grits out. “I—I—” and with the curse still on his lips he slumps, his head rolling onto Roan’s shoulder. A horrid sound wrenches from Mose and a terrible pain fists itself from Roan’s belly up through his chest. He catches himself on a sob and is startled like a child who’s known only the pain of the flesh. He drops his forehead against that wildly thatched brow and his mouth trembles.
I’ve read and delighted in Donna Morrissey before, but still, I was happily surprised by how entranced I was by Rage the Night. Set a century ago across the Northern breadth of Newfoundland, and blending domestic drama and real-life historic tragedy, Morrissey delivers a heart-pounding, riveting tale of identity, survival, and finding one’s tribe. Centred on a decent young man who leaves behind everything’s he’s known — travelling through frigid snows by dog sled, decrepit sealing ship, and finally, by frozen foot — I couldn’t help but become incredibly invested in this one character’s survival (which was a neat literary trick to make me care about the [mostly faceless] scores of men involved in the historical event.) If I had a complaint: This character’s domestic mystery (the impetus for his journey) is pretty convoluted and drawn out and I was often unsure what was happening or if I had missed something along the way. Taking off half a star for that, but happily rounding up to five. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He is struck with the desire to beat the remaining snow from this cold grave, to shovel down through the earth until he reaches Frances Elizabeth and the little nest of bones upon her skeletal breast. Then all would be still, the spirits pummelled back into their graves and he restored to what he was before the old nurse spun out her confession.
Roan — raised in an orphanage on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, but as a favourite of the local doctor, educated at a fine Boston boarding school — has learned, at twenty years old, details of his birth that send him immediately in search of some rumoured family in the colony’s faraway capital of St. John’s. Roan is an intelligent, damaged, big-hearted character, and as he makes his way through the long snowy stretches by dogsled, the people that he meets and helps along the way prove that he would make a good minister or doctor with further education, as his mentor back home had hoped. When he finally arrives in St John’s, Roan sees the men he’s searching for scrambling to make their berths on the sealing ship The Newfoundland, and although he has not done this work before, he’s able to secure his own berth and follows along, standing out awkwardly from his shipmates with his polished speech and well-made clothing. As Roan slowly becomes accepted by the men below-decks (a camaraderie he never knew as a backwoods orphan outcast at boarding school), and as he forces a few awkward conversations with the man he believes to hold the key to his origins, the real-life tragedy of The Newfoundland plays out: a heart-pounding tale of survival and brotherhood in the face of greedy Captains and cold-hearted nature. Between the relatable characters and the evocative nature writing, Morrissey has crafted a compelling story that critiques social imbalances that hold true today.
Uncle Jack sings, his voice starting to hoarsen, sounding rougher than an anchor dragging the ocean floor. “Abiiide with meee, ooooh, abiiiide with me.” The men sing with him: they sing to keep themselves going, they sing to banish the cries of the dying, they sing to banish their own fear of dying, they sing to banish the night and banish thoughts of their weakening legs and frozen fingers and hungry bellies, and their songs are their tears and their voices are as one and it is louder than the winds.
The best part of Rage the Night is witnessing the decent, yearning Roan find his tribe among the motley sealing crew (so many wonderful scenes with the distinctive, humorous Newfoundland accent and patter), and when the crew finds themselves in a harrowing survival situation, watching as they fight for one another; closer than any family. As I wrote above, the unravelling mystery of Roan’s origins was a bit too convoluted for my tastes, but I do appreciate how Morrissey used this as the catalyst, backstory, and plot propellor: it certainly did humanise the historic tragedy to follow along with this outsider as he learned the economic pressures that would send poor men to sea in such a dangerous industry. This book has so much heart — and simply incredible nature writing — and is exactly to my tastes.
