A difficult place to leave
F or me coincidental connections have a lot to do with recognition and perception. Recently I completed Michael Crummey’s gripping novel Sweetland (2014) about an island off the coast of Newfoundland called Sweetland and a man who lives there named Moses Sweetland.
As I was pondering the book and dwelling upon its intriguing events and ending, I attended a concert in Riverport, N.S., headlined by the legendary Ron Hynes. Now Hynes is, like Crummey, a creative Newfoundlander; he is the older of the two, born in 1950. Crummey is a rural Newfoundlander born in 1965. Happily, Hynes has recovered sufficiently from a recent battle with throat cancer and is able to take the stage again. Sometimes known as ‘the man of a thousand songs’ (the title of one of his compositions) and much honoured among East Coast singer/ songwriters, he is perhaps best known for “Sonny’s Dream,” a song covered by many recording artists.
It was striking for me to hear Ron Hynes perform; his articulation is less precise than it once was (though he always mumbled a little), but he certainly held his own at the concert. One particular song, “No Change in Me,” caught my attention. Its chorus reads as follows:
No change in the weather and no change in me,
I don’t want to leave but you can’t live for free;
And you can’t eat the air and you can’t drink the sea,
No change in the weather and no change in me.
The experience of reading Sweetland came forcefully back to me as I listened to Hynes sing that evening. As he worked through his set list, ably backed by Brian Bourne on ‘The Chapman Stick,’ other songs like “I Love This House” caught my attention. So did two that he linked to literary sources, one to Donna Morrissey and one to playwright David French. French’s well-known play Leaving Home had moved Hynes, especially in the wake of John Crosbie’s putdown of French—you are no longer a Newfoundlander if you choose to work in Toronto. That remark led Hynes to write the song.
That infamous encounter between politician and playwright hits at a definitive problem still facing many Newfoundlanders. Much as one loves one’s home place, much as one is essentially at home there, one often needs to leave the island in order to work and survive.
Some of you may recall one of the earliest Canadian film classics, Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road (1970). Having to leave the beloved home place is at the heart of Hynes’s song just as it was a challenge Moses Sweetland had to meet early on in moving to Hamilton, Ontario, only to be gruesomely injured on the job. I asked Ron Hynes if he had read any of Michael Crummey’s novels (notably, The River Thieves and Galore)—“no,” he replied, “but I know his sister.”
Sweetland is a remarkable book. I had been aware of Crummey’s work for more than twenty years, but this is the first of his novels I have read. I am now a convert and eager to read his earlier books. And Sweetland as a novel certainly looks backward. The story concerns Moses’s refusal to leave his native island off the coast of Newfoundland. Haunted by his ancestral and personal ghosts, he resists the government’s offer of $100,000 to each family to leave and thus put an end to the island community and all its costly services. The time is 2012 and the new civic strategy is a dark echo of the devastating resettlement plan devised by Joey Smallwood’s government in the 1950s which closed hundreds of coastal communities in the name of modern efficiencies. The new plan follows from the province’s new-found wealth in oil resources and its decision to impose further efficiencies on its citizens. Small islands that depend on ferry schedules and other government services, are seen as too costly to maintain. Sadly, the new provincial riches seldom address the needs of struggling citizens.
Moses resists the offer, alienating many of his neighbours, but eventually he complies with the buyout, not to get the money for himself, but to aid the hopes of his fellow islanders. However, he has a secret plan to return and live on his own on Sweetland. To that end he stockpiles all that he thinks he needs to survive the many cold months ahead without power, food sources, human contact, or even a boat. In returning to the island, he casts his own boat off into the ocean.
What follows is harrowing indeed. Crummey catches us between the challenges of the real world of daily survival and the deep-seated vagaries of Moses’s mind. He is in fact dying and he is haunted by his memories, so much so that the reader is often uncertain about what is real or imagined. Several beloved acquaintances haunt Moses — particularly his brother Hollis, who drowned as a young man when they were fishing in a dory, and young Jesse, the troubled son of a close friend who also drowns. There are many other intriguing characters like the feral Priddle brothers (who periodically work in Fort McMurray) and Queenie Coffin, who sits at her open window but never leaves her house. But the narrative key is troubled but heroic Sweetland who struggles with his ghosts and his love for his native cove as his strength slowly deserts him. Michael Crummey told an interviewer that watching his own father dying of cancer helped him to create the portrait of Moses, hanging on to his dying world. Thus Sweetland thinks despairingly, “A life was no goddamn thing in the end . 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.” But life itself is much more and Sweetland bristles with its riches and confusions.
It’s important to add that Crummey’s writing is a special delight. He embraces a language that is richly colloquial and very much of the island experience and environment. There is talk of “a down cow”; there is colorful swearing galore; fog is “mauze” “along the mash” (meadow); while “the wind faffered around him, picking at his clothes”— Crummey’s islanders use ”An antediluvian vocabulary spoken in accents so inbred and misshapen” that Newfoundlanders in Toronto “felt like foreigners everywhere … in the city.” Sweetland is a remarkable reading experience and a powerful and poignant reminder to us in Ontario of the struggles and losses faced by others in our home and native land.