Galore (edition 2011)

Set in the small Newfoundland town of Paradise Deep, Galore gets your attention pretty quickly with a pale, odd man arriving on the shore in the belly of a whale. Now you know you're in for some magic realism or some supernatural goings-on or something along those lines. I've seen comparisons to One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I can sort of get it - both novels cover a long time period and multiple generations of families. But where Solitude grabbed me, pulled me in and didn't let me go, I had difficulties with Galore. Judah (the guy in the whale) was definitely the most interesting character to me at the beginning, but then the narration drifts away from him and spends a long time with the other townspeople. At the end of Part I, I was seriously considering abandoning it. I decided to push on for a little while more, though, and somewhere around the 2/3 mark, it turned around for me.

The lives of the townspeople are drawn with mythic and Biblical overtones, and actions have long-reaching generational consequences. The magic realism is pretty minimal overall; the book is mostly about people making a go of living in an unforgiving place.

Recommended for: people who like the idea of East of Eden crossed with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Canadians.

Quote: "She'd arrived in Newfoundland determined to turn the wheel of progress a notch and managed only to grind herself down on the implacable rock of the place." ( )

A rather rambling tale set during the early settlement of Newfoundland. So, very, very cold. Families intertwining (luckily there are two fairly useful family trees at the front); feuds lasting for generations until they become a habit, and no one can remember why their family hates another family; and a generous dose of magical realism.

The book starts when a whale beaches one winter, and is the salvation of the starving people who are trying to settle in Paradise Deep. When they butcher its carcass, a man is discovered inside the whale, who is still living.

I mostly enjoyed this book, I thought the characters were fascinating and I'm always a bit of a sucker for some magical realism. It did drag for me a bit towards the end (I was also getting a bit tired of being constantly muddled as to who-was-who and why-did-they-hate-them-again?), but the ending itself was worth plowing through the more convoluted plot points. ( )

** spoiler alert ** 26 November 11

Sheesh!! Finally thought to cut and paste my Book Browse review over here.

To begin reading Galore by Michael Crummey is to be invited into an epic novel of historical fiction that will compel you forward as you are overtaken by beautiful storytelling and fantastical events. For those who love to escape into their reading, this book will serve you well as it offers a true, unputdownable distraction from the reality of our more regular and everyday lives.

Galore was written over four years and is the third novel Crummey has set in Newfoundland. Born, raised and still living in the Canadian province that inspires his fiction, Crummey tackles some big themes in Galore. When asked about his newest novel, he responds by saying that "So much of Newfoundland's story seems tied up in…the unlikely resurrection after all hope has been lost. Loss and heartbreak and grief. Yes. And otherworldly resilience in the face of it. Rebirth. Wonder."

Sprawling wondrously over two hundred years, coming to an end during World War I, Galore tells the story of two connected families, the Sellers and the Devines, and two connected fishing communities in remote Newfoundland, Paradise Deep and The Gut (both fictional). Many events are addressed over the length of the story - love and loss, family, religion; folklore; times of feast and famine; births; deaths; traditions; the development of the fishing industry; unionization; a ghost; curses; a witch; medicine and the Great War. Phew! Given all this subject matter, Crummey successfully achieves the almost unfathomable in packaging this sweeping story of Newfoundland within just 350 pages.

Galore opens with two births in the outport village of Paradise Deep - one a grown man who has been cut from the belly of a beached whale and the other a new baby to a village family. Over the course of a few days, both appear to be closer to exiting the world than staying in it. The man, pale, bleached ("almost-albino") and stinking of rotted fish, is mute, naked and initially thought to be dead. However, showing weak signs of life, he is tended by the town's "witch", the Widow Devine, matriarch of the Devine family and grandmother of the new baby, as well as a gifted healer and midwife. The baby is also weak and struggling to live - coffins are built for both man and infant. The stranger, unconscious and uncommunicative, gives the town's people much to consider: Who is he? How did he get in the belly of the whale? The name debate, very early on in the book, is an example of the humor to be found in Galore:

"He come right out of the whale's belly", James Woundy announced, as if he had been the only one person present to see it. "As God is my witness so he did. Just like that one Judas in the Bible."

"Not Judas, you arse."

James turned to look at Jabez Trim. "Well, who was it then, Mr. Trim?"

"Jonah, it was. Jonah was swallowed by the whale."

"You sure it weren't Judas, Mr. Trim?"

"Judas was the disciple who betrayed Our Lord for thirty pieces of silver."

"And he was thrown overboard," James said. "That's how I minds it. Thrown into the ocean for betraying the Lord. With a millstone about his neck. And God had him eat up by a whale. To teach him a hard lesson."

"Jonah was fleeing the Lord God Almighty," Jabez insisted. "God chose him to be a prophet and Jonah had rather be a sailor and he ran from God aboard of a ship. And he was thrown into the sea by his mates to save themselves from a savage storm the Lord set upon them. And God sent a whale to swallow Jonah."

That's a fine story, Mr. Trim," James said. "But it don't sound quite right to my memory."

"Goddamn it, James Woundy. Do I have to bring out the Book and show you?"

"Now, sir, as I cannot read, I don't see how that would go far to clearing the matter up."

"Well you'll just have to take my word for it then," Jabez said.

Judah is the name reached in compromise. The infant is named Michael. And so the stranger and child are baptised, Paradise Deep-style, passed among the branches of Kerrivan's Tree (a scraggly apple tree that produces sour fruit) in an effort to save their lives in a manner more in keeping with the folkloric traditions of the community than the ritualistic manner of organized religion. The tree, carried as a sapling to the village from Ireland many years before, is thought to offer strength and protection to those woven through its branches. Judah and Michael, both improve after this ceremony and are born-again into the community.

Crummey has long thought of "the outports [of Newfoundland] as Old Testament landscapes, places where it's easier to believe in a vengeful and jealous deity than in the gentle Lamb of God. So the Old Testament is a big character in the novel." Indeed, along with the punishing landscape and unforgiving weather, many of the characters' names, Mary Tryphena, Lazarus, Absalom, Eli, Abel, Esther and Levi (to name a few), are pulled directly from the Bible; each one of them eccentric, layered and fully developed. Many are uneducated, rough and carrying generation-long grudges. These people can be almost as harsh and imposing as the setting in which they live.

While "galore" denotes plenty, abundance and wealth, this novel traces not only the good times, but the more frequent hard times as well. Newfoundland, perhaps more so than any other province in Canada, is unique. Cast out in the Atlantic ocean, this isolated island was born through the strength and resolve of settlers from Ireland and Britain and the native "bushborns". Existences were carved out on the "Rock" (a nickname for Newfoundland) through fishing, trapping, whaling and sealing - some years more plentiful than others. The winter seasons were long and bleak; people starving to death during the seemingly endless frozen months. Yet, amongst all of these challenges to survival are times of plenty and times of hope. The characters in Galore pull together, individuals and families working as one to ensure not only the survival of each other, but the continuity of their community for the generations who will follow.

04 April 11

Second reading of this novel and it was as strong and beautiful as the first time I read it in late 2009. I am working on a review of this book for BookBrowse so, unfortunately, can't go into great detail here just yet.

I will say this novel is epic, magical, perfect.

12 December 09

Following below, is, I think, the best review of this novel I have read. I posted it upon completing my first read of Crummey's story, sixteen months ago.

~Review from the Globe and Mail~ Written by: Steven Galloway, author of the novel The Cellist of Sarajevo.

"Galore opens with a group of people in the fictional Newfoundland outport of Paradise Deep, slaughtering a whale that has inexplicably beached itself. Young Mary Tryphena watches as the body of a man, pale and stinking, is cut from the whale's belly. Her grandmother, an old crone named Devine's Widow, defies the town oligarch, King-me Sellers, and has the man carried up the hill to prepare him for a proper burial.

The man, it turns out, is in fact alive, though he cannot speak a word. In the spirit of compromise and illiteracy, he is given the name of Judah. He never does utter a word, and he never loses his stench, but his presence ignites a spark in Paradise Deep that sustains the story for multiple generations.

Crummey's prose is flawless. He has a way with the colloquial that escapes many writers, an ability to make the idiosyncrasies of local speech an asset in creating an image in the reader's mind.

“They'd scaled the whale's back to drive a stake with a maul, hoping to strike some vital organ, and managed to set it bleeding steadily. They saw nothing for it then but to wait for God to do His work and they sat with their splitting knives and fish prongs, with their dip nets and axes and saws and barrels. The wind was razor sharp and Mary Tryphena lost all feeling in her hands and feet and her little arse went dunch on the sand while the whale expired in imperceptible increments. Jabez Trim waded out at intervals to prod at the fat saucer of an eye and report back on God's progress.”

I have, for example, never heard the word “dunch” in my life. But still I know what it means, and have even from time to time felt it in my own rear side. There are writers who can send you scowling for a dictionary, and writers who throw you laughing into language. I went to the dictionary only because of this review, and “dunch” wasn't there. It doesn't need to be.

I believe that books, or at least good books, have a voice. I'm not talking about narrators or characters or that sort of thing; what I mean is that the book itself feels alive and it has a personality and sound all of its own, independent of whatever other stylistic devices are at play within its pages. In this respect, Galore succeeds brilliantly. It's a book that will live in the minds of readers long after they've turned the final page.

Where Crummey's first two novels took one or more characters and placed them in a historical context that allowed readers to see both the characters and Newfoundland, which is how most historical novels work, Galore achieves a far more difficult effect. The characters, plot and setting have been fused, in that this book isn't so much about the people and the events and places that affect them as it is the folkloric sum of Newfoundland, and the characters, as individual and real and compelling as they are, are, for all their strangeness, archetypes, an odd and wonderful mash of biblical and pagan touchstones. It's an incredibly difficult task to make characters such as these work as human beings as well as elements of folklore, and Crummey does it with as much skill and grace as Gabriel Garcia Márquez does in One Hundred Years of Solitude , a novel very much the forebear of this book.

We eventually follow the descendents of young Mary Tryphena through the years, watch as Paradise Deep flourishes and flounders, see the ripples of events that happened years before, see history repeat and morph and repeat again. In Galore , the ghosts are real and the real people live as ghosts. Things that shouldn't happen do. You could, I suppose, call the book a sort of magic realism, though I'm not sure if that doesn't confine it in a way I'm not willing to do. There's something about the term “magic realism” that suggests that magic isn't real, and besides that, the magic that takes place in Paradise Deep isn't really magic, it's simply a part of the known world, like gravity or rainfall.

We have, in Canada, a handful of writers who are able, in the minds of readers, to define a place. While I've never lived in, or in some cases been to, the Miramichi, Comox Valley, Cape Breton or Montreal, I've read David Adams Richards, Jack Hodgins, Alistair MacLeod and Mordecai Richler. As a result, those places live as vividly in my imagination as many places in which I've spent more time and about which I know more factually. Perhaps even more vividly.

Michael Crummey is without a doubt one of Canada's finest writers. I won't thrust the mantle of the voice of Newfoundland on him, as he may well in the future write about other parts of the world, and I will be happy, as a reader, to follow him there. Throw a rock on the Rock, burning or not, and you'll hit a good writer (please don't actually throw rocks at writers, or anyone). But the Newfoundland that exists in my imagination – the one that may not be real and if it ever was real likely doesn't exist today – smells and tastes and sounds like Galore . ~ written by Steven Galloway is the author of "The Cellist of Sarajevo" ( )

This is 100 Years of Solitude, with a lighter touch and and Old Testament flair, set in Newfoundland. Many Canadian reviewers have testified to the cultural accuracy of this multi-generational, folkloric novel, but that shouldn't make American readers shy away, because the setting also feels just like any tiny New England town. The love and myth and atmosphere will stay with you - highly recommended.

Update: Coming to the US from Other Press in Spring 2011! ( )

Great. 8 1/2, maybe 9. At first, before I read it, I wondered if it would be too fantastical for my tastes. But no. He pulled it off. The magical or the legendary bits were just part of it. He smoothly integrated it so you feel, you know that they live this way of thinking. That even the un-real is real. ( )