Julienne Isaacs Recommends SWEETLAND by Michael Crummey

SWEETLAND
By Michael Crummey
Doubleday Canadan, 2014

Arguably, there’s no worse time to recommend a novel than right after it’s been shortlisted for the Governor General’s literary award—what words can the reviewer add to the many accolades already swarming the work?

Michael Crummey’s newest novel, Sweetland, follows on the heels of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning Galore (2009). It’s a fitting follow-up: like Galore, Sweetland fuses cultural norms and folklore, infuses Newfoundland’s realpolitik with elements of the supernatural.

The novel’s setting is the fictional Newfoundland island of Sweetland; its eponymous hero, Moses Sweetland, is the last holdout blocking a government resettlement package which requires all island residents to sign on to the deal. At first, the eccentric Sweetland is moved by neither pleas nor threats from friends and neighbours. Ultimately, however, he is left alone on the island, and the tale becomes one of survival.

Crummey is a master of his craft: the narrative is packed with dialogue that rings with black humour—his characters’ voices, particularly that of Sweetland, are redolent of coastal culture while avoiding clichés. But it’s the novel’s slow descent into the supernatural that strikes bone-deep. Sweetland reminded me of Wayne Johnston’s beautiful The Custodian of Paradise, in which the journalist Sheilagh Fielding retreats to a deserted Newfoundland island to sort through her memories, finding instead the terror of loneliness.

Isolation, while an attractive concept in the abstract, can spawn madness in reality; finally left to his own devices on the deserted island, Sweetland plumbs its depths. He begins to see things, hear things. These passages (lights in windows, figures in the dark) feel all the more chilling for Sweetland’s cranky pragmatism.

At its heart, Sweetland is about identity. How much do we belong to the land? When are we allowed to cut loose? Simply by staying, Moses Sweetland has tied his identity to that of the island:

---

He looked up to the hills surrounding the cove, sunlight making them ring with meltwater. He’d always loved that sound, waited for it each spring. Hearing it made him certain of the place he came from. He’d always felt it was more than enough to wake up here, to look out on these hills. As if he’d long ago been measured and made to the island’s exact specifications.

Later, however, when survival has taken a bitter toll, Sweetland finds himself in front of a photograph of his Uncle Clar, poised forever in youth, and sees himself,

superimposed on the ancient picture there, a ghostly image hovering in the background, as if he was a second exposure on the same strip of film. A figure bled of detail and substance, so that all the world showed through him. Moses Sweetland. This is he.

Sweetland is far from sweet—it is salt-rimed and haunting, a compelling portrait that has earned its accolades.

Julienne Isaacs is a Winnipeg writer and reviewer. She is books editor for Rhubarb magazine and staff writer for The Town Crier, The Puritan’s blog. Follow her on twitter at @isaacs_julienne.