Verbal Magazine

New Found Newfoundland

In 1858, a transatlantic cable for the first time offered direct communication between Europe and North America. 

It connected two telegraph stations, one on Valentia Island, off the coast of Co Kerry, the other at Heart’s Content on the coast of Newfoundland, in Canada. This may well be the most famous connection made between the two islands, but it is by no means the only one.
During the Second World War, the famous Newfie-Derry supply run helped save Europe during the battle of the Atlantic, and over a century earlier the partnership between Newfoundland and Waterford gave Newfoundland over 30,000 new habitants. Even if you don’t count the landfall that St. Brendan may have made in the 6th century, the ties between Ireland and what Newfoundlanders call The Rock, are as close as any other member of the Irish Diaspora, perhaps closer.
But this year’s International IMPAC Dublin Award long-list highlights yet another connection. No less than three Newfoundland writers are vying for the prestigious award, proving that, like Ireland, Newfoundland may be a small island at the periphery of a large continent, but its writers are by no means on the margins of the literary world. 

Lisa Moore’s novel, February, is the only one of the three award nominees to be published in Ireland. It is set in St. John’s, Newfoundland’s capital city, but the main character, Helen O’Mara, hails from Heart’s Content. She is Catholic, of Irish descent, but fully a Newfoundlander. The book starts with an iconic Canadian image—Helen watching her son’s ice skates getting sharpened—then shortly thereafter takes on a more maritime feel as the tragedies in Helen’s past unfold.
February is set against the historic events of 1982, when the Ocean Ranger oil-rig sunk off Newfoundland’s coast, killing 84 members of its crew, including Helen’s husband. It is a novel about loss, filled with the dreaded Atlantic. Throughout, Helen and her son trawl the emotions associated with tragedy, sometimes inhabiting the final moments of the disaster, the water breeching an unsecured porthole, the panic jump into the waves and the rescue ship rocking in the storm helplessly as flailing rig-workers go under, one by one—the useless rescue ropes, a victim of the February storm, lay frozen in coils on the deck. For years Helen is bound by this grief, but as the novel ends she surfaces into a new hope, giving the tragic novel its buoyancy.

Michael Crummy’s novel, Galore, starts off with the Atlantic spitting up a man lodged in the belly of a whale. The ocean is again the backdrop as the Newfoundland poet chronicles the changes—or lack of changes—brought upon a small fishing village in the 19th and early 20th century. Invariably, the novel brims over with salt water and fishy tales, with mythical whales and shipwrecks; but also there are religious superstitions that at the same time save and choke the Newfoundland community.
Crummy follows two families over the course of a century, charting relational patterns as if on a pie-chart. Character flaws haunt generation after generation as power is passed down from father to son. Connecting these families are a scattering of magical events—ghosts walk the village at night, certain trees are used to heal the sick. As a literary mode it is magic realism, but for the Newfoundland community it is just simply real.
The landscape shapes Galore, and it is a landscape that harkens back to the country where many of the characters in the book come from. “Dark water and ragged patches of pale blue over shoal ground,” one character describes. “As a younger woman she often thought of Ireland gone under that horizon and swallowed up by the waters. But it has been a lifetime since she’d felt that regret, knowing it was useless to ask questions of the past.” And if the sea is seen to swallow up history, the land doesn’t offer so much as a shovels’ worth of earth. “You get two feet down into that [ground] and you’re liable to believe the land don’t want us here, alive or dead,” another character observes, harshly.

If Michael Crummy’s book ruminates on the darker sides of humanity, the final Newfoundland novel on the IMPAC long-list, Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise, stays rooted in hope, and delightfully, in humour. Like in February, the main character, Audrey ‘Oddly’ Flowers, is dealing with the loss of a family member, her father. The novel begins as she makes her way back to Newfoundland from her adopted home on the west coast of America. Oddly hates flying, loves her tortoise, Winnifred (who is also a character in the novel), and is obsessed with living life as if she were a character in the board game, Clue.
Despite the fears, Oddly is compelled to travel to England, her father’s home country, in an attempt to uncover secrets from her childhood, and also solve the mystery of a disappeared mouse, named Wedge. What she finds in England is the reason her father left in the first place, the reason he retreated to Newfoundland. “England was another word for Grandmother,” Oddly points out, and it was her Grandmother that her father was fleeing from, for reasons shown hauntingly in the final pages of the book.
With a population about the same as Belfast and it’s surrounding towns, Newfoundland is by no means a metropolis—St. John’s is roughly the size of Derry. It is a place many people are forced to leave in order to find work. As a result, Newfoundland is often a place one is from, but not always a place where one lives.
In spite of this, writers on The Rock have grown a vibrant community within the stony ground of their province. And if it is true that a harsh landscape is the best way to grow an artist, then surely Ireland and Newfoundland have more in common than Irish accents and quaint pubs—there is rock, there is water, and thus, there are writers.

back to top