The bookish audience includes enough people, of sufficient diversity, that someone has surely been wondering, roughly, “Why don’t they ever publish any sweeping family epics anymore — spanning multiple generations, in some out-of-the-way location? The Australian outback, say? Or Mongolia, or the Argentine pampas? Or — heck, why not Newfoundland?!?”
I’ve never counted myself among the audience for that sort of fiction, so I’ve never asked a question like that — even rhetorically. Historical fiction proper? Oh, sure, that: I do like to read on occasion about a handful of characters in some (real or imagined) past time.
But big, sprawling family sagas too often seem (to me, from the outside) entirely too, well, Biblical. There’s a lot of begetting going on, of course — offstage if not on the page — so you’ve got a large cast of characters, and a lot of tangled relationships, and often big and actual historical events looping through and around all these private lives, and you’ve got to carry it all around in your head at once because at any given moment you may need to know that Daisy was Dorrie’s granddaughter — that’s Daisy, Doris’s daughter, the one married to Darryl, remember? the one with the misspelt tattoo reading “Darren” which was really awkward because Darren was actually her first and dearest (but now long deceased) love as opposed to Darryl, who was merely the most durable…
So what, then, was I doing reading Michael Crummey’s Galore?
The short answer: I was reading it on the strong recommendation of a trusted friend, one with good taste in words and in life as well as in books. The general description of the book at Amazon — I still haven’t read any of the reviews, there or elsewhere — also gave me hope for something, well, meaty. Something substantial.
Aside: I’ve embarked on a personal project to read nothing but fiction in 2015. (Not looking for suggestions generally, however. The to-be-read list is already yards long.) I’m trying to vary the pacing and type of the fiction selected, but had hit a run of thrillers-and-science-fiction-and-breezy-stuff. I was casting about for something fairly recent, not necessarily literary but, y’know, weighty… and there was the Galore recommendation, just when I needed it — or at least was receptive to it!
Frankly, I hadn’t counted on what I found: over the course of 300-350 pages, an almost unbelievable density of story and language. The pages are chockablock with prose — paragraphed prose, to be sure, and there’s plenty of dialogue (although it’s set off not by quotation marks, but by em dashes). But it did feel to me a bit of a slog at times, especially in the last one-third or so of the first half. I couldn’t believe how little progress I was making. (And I dozed a fair bit, too.)
But I stayed with it. And it pulled me right along, eventually; the last third of it, especially, I pretty much galloped through.
A brief outline of events: The span of time covered by the book begins sometime in the 18th century, and continues to the years immediately following World War I. The setting, yes, is Newfoundland, that isolated rugged island off the coast of eastern Canada. Two island families’ histories intertwine: the Devines, their lives and attentions devoted to fish (especially cod) and the sea; and the Sellers, merchants and landowners.
The first milestone in this timeline, as treated by the book: a whale washes up on the shore. It’s dismembered by the Devines and their companions — who are stunned to discover, within its stomach, a man, still living. (He’s evidently been there for a while, too: his skin and hair are pale, white in fact, and his body emerges — and forever remains — suffused with the smell of dead fish.) It doesn’t feel accurate to say that thus begins the story, in the conventional sense of a precipitating factor or event whence everything else flows; more or less the same history would have unfolded, I believe, with or without this miraculous fulcrum to nudge it one way or the other. But I gotta admit, this is a pretty striking starting point.
About the title: discounting the front matter, especially the blurbs, and the acknowledgements at the end, the word galore appears in the book exactly three times. That may or may not be significant (at the least, counter-intuitive). Still, I thought it might be useful to quote those three passages to give you a sense of the prose — the diction and the rhythms in which the story and characters come wrapped.
Sample 1 (page 21), from a passage about the profusion of fish:
They spoke of the days of plenty with a wistful exaggeration, as if it was an ancient time they knew only through stories generations old. My Jesus, the cod, the cod, the cod, that Crusade army of the North Atlantic, that irresistible undersea current of flesh, there was fish in galore one time. Boats run aground on a school swarming so thick beneath them a man could walk upon the very water but for fear of losing his shoes to the indiscriminate appetite of the fish.
…and sample 2 (page 114), a conversation between a priest, more or less fallen, and a woman haunted by the shade of her undeniably dead husband:
The priest set out early the next morning and walked to the house in the droke. Mrs. Gallery didn’t get up from the table, calling him in from where she sat. Her husband occupied his usual chair by the fire, huddling close to the flames, as if against a draft.
—He’s forever cold, Mrs. Gallery said. —I think sometimes he might sit his arse right in the fire to try and get warm.
—There’s fire galore awaiting him elsewhere, Father Phelan said. —Does he talk to you at all?
—He talks only to himself. And I can’t pick out a word of it.
…and finally sample 3 (page 173), again describing the quantities of fish available from nearby fishing grounds:
Judah and Lazarus were the first to give up on the local fishery, sailing for the coast of Labrador each May. They found fish galore there and for the last time Jude’s talismanic luck drew men from up and down the shore. Hundreds living the same migratory existence now, away from home all summer. Three decades they’d been making the trip, staying through September or October if the weather held, the Devine women left alone half the year to fend for themselves.
See what I mean about the prose’s texture, the density? If I didn’t know that the book had been published just within the last couple years, I’d more easily imagine its coming from the imagination of a late-Victorian novelist.
As I said, at many moments in reading Galore, I thought, Where’s this going? I’ve only read how much so far? and so on.
But — again — at some uncertain point, I stopped asking those questions. I’d been caught.
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