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?
