They then become part of the history of Paradise Deep and The Gut, or, as Crummey suggests, part of its myth. Character and setting begin blending into one as the novel’s many personages interact, interbreed, and die over the course of two centuries. For the most part, Crummey achieves the link. Our emotion should be bound to this land. This setting is ultimately the real protagonist. This thoroughly researched portrayal is rugged and real, deeply felt with touches of fancy that render this often unknown speck of North America intriguing. Several characters tend to serve as the novel’s protagonist at one point or another, but the real prize for the reader is in actualizing the imaginative world created by the author.Ĭrummey’s portrait of Newfoundland, his hometown, smacks of emotional honesty. The main conflict is between the two most prominent families of Paradise Deep and The Gut - The Devines and The Sellers, surnames allegorical to just the right degree. Thankfully, a prefatory family tree directs traffic. Like all good magically realistic works, the character list is long, sordid and intertwining. But the question curious readers will have is whether or not Crummey does anything new and exciting with the magical-realism genre, and some may persecute his soul for aping such a stable of twentieth century fiction. Perhaps he is simply trying to foreground the religious themes of the work, like when Judah blots 7:5 onto a page with ink and sand ( Let the enemy persecute my soul, and take it, etc). Perhaps Crummey is alluding to the Bible as first in the tradition of magical realism, developed thousands of years later by Marquez. Which brings us to the novel’s second epigram I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea, says God, in an excerpt from Psalms. An albino man, naked, mute, stinking of fish, and - surprisingly - alive is excavated and dubbed Judah. What the residents find upon cutting the great creature open has impacts immediate and distant, incidental and (possibly) imagined. The novel begins when a dead whale beaches on the shore. His first two novels are also set here, but with Galore Crummey fashions the fictional fishing communities of Paradise Deep and The Gut from the coastal province. In this, the Canadian author’s third and most ambitious novel, a clear debt is owed to Marquez, particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude.Ĭrummey’s setting is north - Newfoundland. At least Crummey makes his inspiration transparent. First, we have Gabriel Garcia Marquez - The invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love, says the Colombian giant in Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

The scope, tenor, and influence of Michael Crummey’s Galore are all suggested by its two opening epigrams.

Galore crummey