Last man fishing

Michael Crummey, who he, just recently won a huge literary prize. I thought I'd get ahead of the pack to reserve something from his back-catalogue in the Library. That would be Sweetland, about the closing of the Newfoundland outports. So many communities dotted around the coast, each having existed for two or three hundred years catching and salting fish, planting spuds and cabbage, trying to win some hay to overwinter a cow. In the 20thC amenities and aspirations came in - district nurse, electricity, tinned peaches, all served and serviced by regular ferries to the few proper towns. The Canadian government wanted to allow all citizens opportunity and welfare. Then bean-counters became ascendant and supporting remote hamlets was exposed as crazy economics. Thousands of CAN$ running empty ferries from point to point where half the homes were boarded up. All the outport Effectives working Fintech in Toronto or the oil-sands of Alberta, raising family in the warm and dry, and not even coming home for Christmas. I wrote about the economic conundrum last year.

Moses Sweetland lives in the village of Chance Cove on the island of Sweetland off the South coast of Newfoundland. An ancestor might have been first footer on the island but Moses is the last of that name. It's a village rather than a hamlet because there's sort of shop and a sort of barber and a sort of museum and a church with a sort of minister. The government stopped the cod fishery 30 years before the main thread of the story - and there are very few ways of making a living on shore. Accordingly folks leave as soon as they're old enough to vote (sometimes earlier) for work and partners in St.John's, or go West to continental Canada. But there is also plenty of native nookie and the results of these liaisons are accepted even if marital non-paternity is known of suspected.

It's not much of a spoiler to acknowledge that Moses is one of the last, and then The Last, hold-out against taking the government bounty and leaving Sweetland for good. The departers can't / don't take everything to leave vacant possession because nobody is going to occupy the ancestral home ever again. There are, therefore agreeable echoes of The Day of the Triffids as the remainers snag anything remotely useful or edible from the people-free dwellings. It is acknowledged, given the brutal Winter weather, that unmaintained empty buildings are going to be reduced to sticks within a few years.

Moses alone remains: embracing a quixotic exercise in survival. . . like a man sentenced to hauling beach stones up the face of the Mackerel Cliffs. You'll read your own messages but this is fiction that can offer clues about what it is to be human and how to live with the cards neighbours you're dealt. I'm returning the book to the library; it's all yours.