I heard Michael Crummey read last week at the Company House
in Halifax, with Stan Dragland and Sara Tilley. They were – are – all remarkable.
I’ve just finished reading Michael Crummey’s novel, Sweetland.
Sweetland is an
end-of-days tale. Rather than a post-apocolyptic whimper, this one sings out in tenor,
baritone and bass because of the government’s resettlement of Newfoundland
outports. The protagonist, Moses Sweetland, whose family name the island
carries, leads no one to the promised mainland. In fact, in the first half of
the novel, “The King’s Seat,” he alone refuses to sign the agreement that will
give him and every inhabitant of the island resettlement money. And everyone on
the island must sign for that to
happen.
The book’s second half is called “The Keeper’s House.” It’s
difficult to say more without “telling,” and even that is too much.
As I was reading, I felt I was learning what it would be
like to have everything known and loved taken from me, including my society,
like one of Euripedes’ Trojan women.
“A life was no goddamn thing in the end, he thought. Bits and pieces of
make-believe cobbled together to look halfways human, like some stick-and-rag
doll meant to scare crows out of the garden. No goddamn thing at all.” (141)
Moses himself has a scarred face and body, the result of an accident in Toronto
that changes his young life. Accidents. The story is full of them, true to life
the way it is, rather than the way we try to see it. True to death.
The writing, as in the excerpt above, is splendid, tough
poetry. “He took the long way around, past the south-end light on the Mackerel
Cliffs where the day was still bright and cloudless. He steamed in close to the
island, the rocks to starboard so sheer they looked like something CGId in a
Hollywood studio. The sky above the boat confettied with wheeling seabirds,
turrs and murrs and puffins and tinkers, their endless chatter echoing off the
cliff face. The acrid stink of shit like a single fiddle note that held and
held and held in the air.” (147)
Crummey made me believe I was a Sweetlander, as he will you, I suspect. Would we have
signed? We seem willing to desert our planet's ecosystem, the only home we've known, for money. I wonder.
