Old tale fuels author’s ‘triumph of the imagination’
‘The Innocents’ is a masterful piece of Canadian literature
It was a rather stunning experience in contrasts. We were beginning a week, our first ever, at a sunny Cuban resort when I picked up Michael Crummey’s “The Innocents” (Doubleday Canada). It’s set in the 18th century and tells the story of an orphaned brother and sister struggling to survive in a little cove on the stark Atlantic Coast of Newfoundland, about 100 kilometres from Fogo Island.
Though there were many Canadians at our hotel, I noticed few were reading Canadian books; rather I saw volumes of John Grisham and James Patterson in nearby beach cabanas. And as I read this story of raw cold and difficult survival, the sun above was warm and welcoming day after day. It just so happened that “The Innocents” was one of the finalists for the Giller Prize awarded the Monday after our arrival in Varadero. I was sorry to learn that it didn’t win that big prize.
The novel is, I think, more than worthy of that award. For my part, I found it a stunning creative achievement, carefully constructed and delicately written in the ways it embraced the hostile conditions of living in a small, solitary Newfoundland cove; more ominously still, the development of an incestuous relationship over several years haunts its pages. It must have been an extraordinary challenge for Michael Crummey. As I read it, I imagined him carefully at work on each chapter, struggling to characterize accurately the lives of Evered and Ada Best from their respective points of view and to dramatize the setbacks and events that interrupted their very quiet lives. My verdict, which I suspended until the very end of the story, is that “The Innocents” is a masterful piece of fiction.
Given my own background, I inevitably thought of Catharine Parr Traill’s “Canadian Crusoes” or “Lost in the Backwoods,” a novel she wrote at Rice Lake in 1852. It proved a very popular narrative well into the 20th century. In it she depicts three teenagers, a brother, his sister and a male cousin, who are lost for nearly two years in the bush/backwoods near Rice Lake in Upper Canada (Ontario). It is a late 18thcentury narrative set during the early settlement period and it celebrates the survival skills, the pluck and savvy, and the well-bred behaviour of the three teenagers during their prolonged adventure. It also includes a brief but frightening brush with two warring First Nations near the lake, an encounter that leads to their being joined by an Indigenous girl abandoned by the departing warriors.
What a contrast in literary reach and historical imagination. While Traill sought to write a gripping adventure story that became, in her hands, a triumph of British and French aspiration over the challenges of the Canadian landscape, Crummey took on a challenging story he discovered in the archives. A travelling minister encountered a brother and sister and their baby in a lonely Newfoundland outport. The young man frightened the parson away with a rifle, and thus the journal entry ended rather lamely. Crummey took up the challenge and gave the incident a life that seems both probable and haunting.
To do so, he uses an unidentified disease to kill off early in the novel both parents, along with the baby Martha, thus leaving Evered and Ada to cope with their isolated and perilous situation. Their test is much more daunting and frightening than either Traill’s story or the harrowing struggles of Moses Sweetland in Crummey’s previous novel, “Sweetland.”
Born two years apart, Evered and Ada don’t even know how old they are when they take over responsibility for running the family home and their small-scale fishing business. First, they bury their father at sea (following the example he set in burying their mother) and they bury their baby sister in the narrow area above the tilt (or cabin) where there is just enough soil to plant a garden. Ada insists on burying Martha there; over the course of the novel she keeps herself sane by talking to Martha’s spirit as if she were still alive and nearby.
The triumph of the novel lies in Crummey’s ability to identify so convincingly with the Best siblings as they struggle to carry on with the only life they know in the only way they know how. Their example is their parents, who were at best a hard-working but taciturn couple. But, given the challenges they face, they are quietly heroic in their work ethic, self-denial, and unquestioning insistence upon carrying on with what they have under nature’s often-cruel rule. Their contacts with the village of Mockbeggar (what a name!) are limited as it is only accessible by a full day of rowing; the only regular social contact they have is with The Hope, a fishing boat from Mockbeggar, which comes by twice a year to deliver supplies and pick up whatever fish (caplin, cod and herring) the Bests have been able to catch and cure.
Crummey provides many vivid descriptions of their shared life over several years as they fish during the spring and summer, pick berries in the fall, and endure the damp cold and paralysis of a coastal winter. “And years passed in that same severe round with little variation but the ratcheting wheel of the seasons and the slow pendulum of The Hope’s appearances to mark time on a human scale.”
Evered and Ada split the work as their parents had done and they deal with occasional visitors as best they can. Theirs is a very private world; they are devoted to each other, referring to themselves as Brother and Sister. In the dark winter with only a hearth fire to dispel the cold, they sleep together as they had done since childhood. When puberty occurs, they adjust their ongoing relationship as best they can, having no guides to help them understand what they are feeling and what their bodies are undergoing.
Crummey is brilliant in taking the siblings from situation to situation. Though a sexual relationship seems inevitable, he makes it clear that both Evered and Ada are surprised and confused when it occurs. After several years of coping with inner confusions that would stagger most of us, the act seems natural and inevitable.
Beyond handling the siblings’ relationship so deftly and introducing a few interesting visitors into their lives, the novel excels in its language and descriptions. A Newfoundland native himself, Crummey steeps the novel in the language of the place, drawing on dictionaries of Newfoundland speech and the province’s “vulgar tongue.”
“I got a dark brown feeling about this, Brother,” says Ada when they board a ship trapped in the ice. Though she doesn’t know it, cannibalism has taken place on board. When Evered suffers from sun blindness Ada ministers to his “blind torment” instinctively. “Is that helping either bit?” she asks and he replies, “It idn’t hurting any.” Referring to his dead wife’s clothes, their father says to Ada, “You’ll have need of these. Now the once.”
The language of the novel was both evocative and authentic. It helped to carry it to its inevitable and not so surprising conclusion. Michael Crummey’s narrative and verbal control transfixed me till the end. “The Innocents” is a major triumph of the Canadian imagination.