A POWERFUL EXPLORATION OF ONE MAN’S BATTLE AGAINST EVERYONE
Part Independent People (for the fierce portrait of its main character’s unwavering determination) and part Absalom, Absalom! (for the unusual set of characters surrounding him), Michael Crummey’s latest novel tells the absorbing story of Moses Sweetland’s singular battle to hold on to his home on a tiny island off the coast of Newfoundland.
From the outset, Crummey makes us understand that the odds are heavily stacked against his hero. Overwhelmingly, Sweetland’s neighbours – a ragtag bunch of fishermen, boozers and ne’er-do-wells – have thrown in their lot with a government plan to relocate everyone away from the island (also named Sweetland, after his ancestors, who founded it) and pay them more money than they’ve ever seen to do so. The only catch is that everyone must succumb or the payoff won’t happen. Hence the tension Crummey has rested literally at Sweetland’s doorstep.
Fortunately for the reader, Moses Sweetland has no intention of going anywhere. His determination becomes “more firmly anchored as the holdouts dwindled, as if to offset the loss in numbers with a blind certainty. He found himself enjoying it almost, to be the one knot they couldn’t untangle. Holding on like grim death and halfways invigorated by the effort.”
One after another, this former lighthouse keeper faces down his eccentric neighbors and family members, as well as the government bureaucrats – and his own deeply rooted demons. It’s an affecting battle, one that leaves him on his own after the power is cut and the ferry service ended. The resilient Sweetland has planned well for his self-sufficiency. He endures brutal storms, withering hunger, foolish expeditions and mind-bending loneliness. In the end, though, as Crummey’s elegant prose and storytelling prowess make abundantly
clear, no man is an island.
Michael Crummey is at the Ullapool Book Festival on 10 May Following hot on the success of the big-screen adaptation of Lisa Genova’s debut novel Still Alice – an exploration of Alzheimer’s disease – the Harvard-educated neuroscientist’s fourth novel, Inside The O’briens, cements her reputation in another defiant and unforgettable story.
Joe O’brien is a formidable Boston