Galore: A Novel

by Michael Crummey Narrated by John Lee

Overview

When a whale beaches itself on the shore of the remote coastal town of Paradise Deep, the last thing any of the townspeople expect to find inside it is a man, silent and reeking of fish but remarkably alive. The discovery of this mysterious person, soon christened Judah, sets the town scrambling for answers as its most prominent citizens weigh in on whether he is man or beast, blessing or curse, miracle or demon. Though Judah is a shocking addition, the town of Paradise Deep is already full of unusual characters. King-me Sellers, self-appointed patriarch, has it in for an inscrutable woman known only as Devine's Widow, with whom he has a decades-old feud. Her granddaughter, Mary Tryphena, is just a child when Judah washes ashore but finds herself tied to him all her life in ways she never expects. Galore is the story of the saga that develops between these families, full of bitterness and love, spanning two centuries.

With Paradise Deep, award-winning novelist Michael Crummey imagines a realm in which the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to discern. Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Crummey (River Thieves) returns readers to historic Newfoundland in his mythic and gorgeous latest, set over the course of a century in the life of a hardscrabble fishing community. After a lean early-19th-century winter, a whale beaches itself and everyone in town gathers to help with the slaughter. But when a woman known only as Devine's Widow—when she's not called an outright witch—cuts into the belly, the body of an albino man slides out. He eventually revives, turns out to be a mute, and is dubbed Judah by the locals. Judah's mystery—is his appearance responsible for the great fishing season that follows?—is only one among many in this wild place, where the people are afflicted by ghosts and curses as much as cold and hunger. Crummey's survey eventually telescopes to the early 20th century, when Judah's pale great-grandson, Abel, sequesters himself amid medical debris in an old hospital where his opera singer cousin, Esther Newman, has returned and resolved to drink herself to death. But before she does so, she shares with him the family history he never knew. Crummey lovingly carves out the privation and inner intricacies that mark his characters' lives with folkloric embellishments and the precision of the finest scrimshaw. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

[An] expansive yarn…in lilting prose.” —The New Yorker

“This is the book that will win Crummey a permanent place in American readers’ hearts. With Galore he has done something much more besides writing a compulsively readable book. He has created an unforgettable place of the imagination. Paradise Deep belongs on the same literary map as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and Garcia Marquez’s Macondo.” —Boston Globe

“Like the two-faced ocean they pull their living from, Crummey’s characters in this multi-generational unwinding are icy and surprising. The denizens of Paradise Deep and its neighboring town, the Gut, end up as twisted as the wind-tortured trees, making for a quirky quilt of personalities that might remind a reader of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News.” —Washington Post

“A glittering, fabulist tale…reminiscent of the work of Jean Giono, particularly Joy of Man’s Desiring, and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, Galore is a tale in which humans are confronted with the miraculous.” —Los Angeles Times

“In grand language and colorful storytelling, Michael Crummey traces through several generations the fortunes of two families from the outport of Paradise Deep in Newfoundland…This is a book to savor. You won’t want to miss any of its delights: the tightly braided narrative skeins, the pathos and humor of the characters, the exotic flavor of a long ago time and place.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“In the annals of memorable family feuds, the Devines and the Sellerses deserve to be added to the Capulets and the Montagues and the Hatfields and McCoys…There’s also something Faulknerian in Crummey’s small-town myth-crafting.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Distinctive and unforgettable…It’s a compelling, haunting portrait of hard lives in a hard place, and for American readers in particular, Crummey’s Newfoundland may prove the definitive version.” —Rain Taxi Review of Books

“Mythic and gorgeous…Crummey lovingly carves out the privation and inner intricacies that mark his characters’ lives with folkloric embellishments and the precision of the finest scrimshaw.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
 “Newfoundland author Crummey’s award-winning third novel…affirms that our lives are always astonishing. It’s been justly compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It also calls to mind Graham Swift’s Waterland and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, as well as William Faulkner’s epic Compson novels, and will appeal to readers who enjoyed those works.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Ghosts, gangsters, mermen and a Christ-like healer who emerges from the belly of a beached whale are among the attractions in a boisterous, one-of-a-kind folk epic about feuding intermarried clans in Newfoundland…A lively, eccentric, mythmaking novel inspired by 200 years of Canadian history.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A dense, sprawling tale of two families bound together by love, secrets, fate, and a mysterious stranger… Spanning two centuries of Canadian history and presented in Garcia Marquez-inspired magical realism fashion, Crummey’s ambitious story of immigrant settlement, family alliances and clashes, heroism and failure is deeply moving and disquieting, sure to make some waves.” —Booklist

“Gratitude galore for Galore, a book so alive with enchantment I should not be surprised if it crawled right out of my hands and into the sea. Truly, a fantastic read.” —Kate Bernheimer, author of The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold and editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

“Michael Crummey is a passionate storyteller. His world is intensely imagined and starkly real. Life leaps off the pages of Galore.” —Jane Mendelsohn, author of I Was Amelia Earhart and American Music

“Michael Crummey’s Galore is a fabulous, fable-filled ball of yarns such as I’ve never encountered before. Tall, but plausible tales, odd, eccentric but weirdly familiar characters, dialogue straight out of the mouths of outport Newfoundlanders, historicized fiction, fictionalized history—it has, as its title suggests, a super-abundance of good things. This is art, but not art full of solemn, self-importance. Galore is artfully, and seriously, entertaining.” —Wayne Johnston, author of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

“It’s an incredibly difficult task to make characters such as these work as human beings as well as elements of folklore, and Crummey does it with as much skill and grace as Gabriel Garcia Márquez does in One Hundred Years of Solitude.” —The Globe and Mail

“Pitch-perfect, boisterous...Galore is an endearing romp. For the language alone — and there is so much more — I loved the book.” —National Post

“Michael Crummey’s third novel injects an element of magic realism to convey an otherworldly quality … a dense, intricate, and absorbing tale, rich in the nuances of human relationships.” —Quill & Quire

“This economically told epic is masterful, written by a man with enough confidence to let his readers interpolate the meaning not only of certain words, but entire character arcs.” —Toronto Star

“Galore is an absolute pleasure. In Crummey’s capable hands, the setting breeds magic... A complex narrative that feels effortless, yet is woven so tightly that the magnificent artistry of its creator cannot be ignored.” —The Walrus

“In a sweeping story of several generations, Galore reveals the lives of the Irish and West Country English in rugged Newfoundland…Capturing the speech and temper of a primitive world, and communicating it perfectly, the writer delivers a masterpiece.” —ForeWord Reviews

Library Journal

Set in Paradise Deep, Newfoundland, this novel chronicles the intertwined lives and loves of two families, the uncanny Devines and the gentrified Sellers, over two centuries. Crummey's prose is glorious throughout, unflinchingly honest and unsentimentally magical. Here, supernatural episodes and anecdotes share the page with naturalistic descriptions of people, physical afflictions, weather, and landscape, and the veil separating life and death is nigh transparent. "Now the once," utters one character near the novel's conclusion, beautifully conveying how past and future meet in the present, a notion Crummey subtly emphasizes by opening and closing the novel with miraculous accounts and linking inhabitants of Paradise Deep to totems—a Bible, a whale carcass—that persist from one generation to the next as they diminish. The effect is dazzling. VERDICT Newfoundland author Crummey's award-winning third novel, published in Canada in 2009, affirms that our lives are always astonishing. It's been justly compared to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. It also calls to mind Graham Swift's Waterland and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, as well as William Faulkner's epic Compson novels, and will appeal to readers who enjoyed those works.—J. Greg Matthews, Washington State Univ., Pullman

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169809640
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	03/29/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1
 
He ended his time on the shore in a makeshift asylum cell, shut away with the profligate stink of fish that clung to him all his days. The Great White. St. Jude of the Lost Cause. Sea Orphan. He seemed more or less content there, gnawing at the walls with a nail. Mary Tryphena Devine brought him bread and dried capelin that he left to gather bluebottles and mold on the floor.
—If you aren’t going to eat, she said, at least have the decency to die. Mary Tryphena was a child when she first laid eyes on the man, a lifetime past. End of April and the ice just gone from the bay. Most of the shore’s meager population—the Irish and West Country English and the bushborns of uncertain provenance—were camped on the gray sand, waiting to butcher a whale that had beached itself in the shallows on the feast day of St. Mark. This during a time of scarcity when the ocean was barren and gardens went to rot in the relentless rain and each winter threatened to bury them all. They weren’t whalers and no one knew how to go about killing the Leviathan, but there was something in the humpback’s unexpected offering that prevented the starving men from hacking away while the fish still breathed. As if that would be a desecration of the gift.
They’d scaled the whale’s back to drive a stake with a maul, hoping to strike some vital organ, and managed to set it bleeding steadily.
They saw nothing for it then but to wait for God to do His work and they sat with their splitting knives and fish prongs, with their dip nets and axes and saws and barrels. The wind was razor sharp and Mary Tryphena lost all feeling in her hands and feet and her little arse went dunch on the sand while the whale expired in imperceptible increments. Jabez Trim waded out at intervals to prod at the fat saucer of an eye and report back on God’s progress.
Halfway along the beach King-me Sellers was carrying on a tournament of draughts with his grandson. He’d hobbled down from his store to make a claim to the animal as it had gone aground below Spurriers’ premises. The fishermen argued that the beach in question wasn’t built over and according to tradition was public property, which meant the whale was salvage, the same as if a wreck had washed ashore. King-me swore he’d have the whale’s liver and eight puncheons of oil or the lot of them would stand before the court he ruled as magistrate.
Once terms were agreed upon Sellers had his grandson bring down his scarred wooden checkerboard and they set out flat stones for the pieces gone missing through the years. His grandson was the only person willing to sit through a game with Sellers, who was known to change the rules to suit himself and was not above cheating outright to win. He owned the board, he told the complainers, and in his mind that meant he owned the rules that governed it as well. His periodic cries of King me! were the only human sound on the landwash as they waited.
Mary Tryphena was asleep when the men finally rushed the shallows, her father shouting for her to fetch Devine’s Widow. She left the beach as she was told, walking the waterside pathway through Paradise Deep and up the incline of the Tolt Road. She crossed the headland that rose between the two coves and carried on into the Gut where her grandmother had delivered Mary Tryphena’s brother that morning. The landwash was red with blood by the time she and the old woman made their way back, a scum of grease on the harbor’s surface. The heart and liver already carted up to King-me’s Rooms on fish barrows, two men harvesting chunks of baleen from the creature’s jaw with axes, the mouth so massive they could almost stand upright inside it. Women and children floated barrels in the shallows to catch the ragged squares of blubber thrown down to them. Mary Tryphena’s grandmother knotted her skirts above the knee before wading grimly into the water.
The ugly work went on through the day. Black fires were burning on the beach to render the blubber to oil, and the stench stoppered the harbor, as if they were laboring in a low-ceilinged warehouse. The white underbelly was exposed where the carcass keeled to one side, the stomach’s membrane floating free in the shallows. The Toucher triplets were poking idly at the massive gut with splitting knives and prongs, dirty seawater pouring from the gash they opened, a crest of blood, a school of undigested capelin and herring, and then the head appeared, the boys screaming and falling away at the sight. It was a human head, the hair bleached white. One pale arm flopped through the ragged incision and dangled into the water.
For a time no one moved or spoke, watching as if they expected the man to stand and walk ashore of his own accord. Devine’s Widow waded over finally to finish the job, the body slipping into the water as she cut it free. The Catholics crossed themselves in concert and Jabez Trim said, Naked came I from my mother’s womb.
The body was dragged out of the water by Devine’s Widow and Mary Tryphena’s father. No one else would touch it though every soul on the beach crowded around to look. A young man’s face but the strangeness of the details made it impossible to guess his age. White eyebrows and lashes, a patch of salt-white hair at the crotch. Even the lips were colorless, nipples so pale they were nearly invisible on the chest. Mary Tryphena hugged her father’s thigh and stared, Callum holding her shoulder to stop her moving any closer.
King-me Sellers prodded at the corpse with the tip of his walking stick. He looked at Devine’s Widow and then turned to take in each person standing about him. —This is her doing, he said. —She got the very devil in her, called this creature into our harbor for God knows what end.
—Conjured it you mean? James Woundy said.
It was so long since King-me accused Devine’s Widow of such things that some in the crowd were inclined to take him seriously. He might have convinced others if he’d managed to leave off mentioning his livestock. —You know what she done to my cow, he said, and to every cow birthed of her since.
It was an old joke on the shore and there was already a dismissive tremor in the gathering when Devine’s Widow leaned over the body, flicking at the shrunken penis with the tip of her knife. —If this was my doing, she said, I’d have given the poor soul more to work with than that.
King-me pushed his way past the laughter of the bystanders, saying he’d have nothing more to do with the devilment. But no one followed after him. They stood awhile discussing the strange event, a fisherman washed overboard in a storm or a suicide made strange by too many months at sea, idle speculation that didn’t begin to address the man’s appearance or his grave in the whale’s belly. They came finally to the consensus that life was a mystery and a wonder beyond human understanding, a conclusion they were comfortable with though there was little comfort in the thought. The unfortunate soul was owed a Christian burial and there was the rest of the day’s work to get on with.
There was no church on the shore. An itinerant Dominican friar named Phelan said Mass when he passed through on his endless ecclesiastical rounds. And Jabez Trim held a weekly Protestant service at one of Sellers’ stores that was attended by both sides of the house when Father Phelan was away on his wanders. Trim had no credentials other than the ability to read and an incomplete copy of the Bible but every soul on the shore crowded the storeroom to soak awhile in the scripture’s balm. An hour’s reprieve from the salt and drudge of their lives for myrrh and aloe and hyssop, for pomegranates and green figs and grapes, cassia and cedar beams and swords forged in silver. Jabez married Protestant couples, he baptized their children and buried their dead, and he agreed to say a few words over the body before it was set in the ground.
Mary Tryphena’s father lifted the corpse by the armpits while James Woundy took the legs and the sorry little funeral train began its slow march up off the landwash. There were three stone steps at the head of the beach, the dead man’s torso folding awkwardly on itself as they negotiated the rise, and a foul rainbow sprayed from the bowels. James Woundy jumped away from the mess, dropping the body against the rocks. —Jesus, jesus, jesus, he said, his face gone nearly as white as the corpse. Callum tried to talk him into grabbing hold again but he refused. —If he’s alive enough to shit, James Woundy said, he’s alive enough to walk.
Mary Tryphena stood watching the pale, pale figure as the argument went on. A man delivered from the whale’s belly and lying dead in his own filth on the stones. Entrance and exit. Which should have been the end of the story but somehow was not. Froth bubbled from the mouth and when the corpse began coughing all but the widow and Mary Tryphena scattered up off the beach, running for their homes like the hounds of hell were at their heels.
Devine’s Widow turned the stranger by the shoulder, thumping his back to bring up seawater and blood and seven tiny fish, one after the last, fry the size of spanny-tickles Mary Tryphena caught in the shallows at Nigger Ralph’s Pond. Selina Sellers came down to the landwash while they stood over him there, her grandson dragging a handbar in her wake. Selina was a tiny slip of a woman and could have passed for the boy’s sister in stature, but there was nothing childlike in her bearing. —You can’t have that one in your house, Selina told them.
—Not with a newborn baby still drawing his first breaths in the world.
Devine’s Widow nodded. —We’ll set him out in the Rooms, is what we’ll do.
—The cold will kill him for certain, Selina said.
They all stared at the stranger as they spoke, not willing to look at one another. His body racked up with tremors and convulsions.
—There’s only the one place for him, Selina said.
—I don’t think Master Sellers would be so keen.
—You let me worry about Master Sellers.
They hauled the stranger onto the fish barrow and started up the path toward Selina’s House on the Gaze. By the time they angled the barrow through the front door everyone in the harbor was watching from a safe distance. Someone sent word to King-me at the store and he was running after them, shouting to keep the foul creature out of his house. He’d sworn that Devine’s Widow would never set foot in the building and no one knew if he was referring to the old woman or to the stark white figure she was carting inside. Selina reached back to bolt the door behind them and they continued on into the house.
Mary Tryphena and King-me’s grandson stood back against the wall, lost in the flurry of activity as water was set to boil and blankets were gathered. King-me was pounding at the door with the head of his cane, shouting threats, and faces crowded at the windows outside. Mary Tryphena had never been inside Selina’s House but the grandness of it was lost on her. She had the queerest sensation of falling as she stared at the naked stranger. A wash of dizziness came over her and she took off her bonnet against the sick heat of nausea as it sidled closer. King-me’s grandson stood beside her and she clutched at the hem of his coat. —You’ll remember this day a long while, I imagine, he said. The boy had a fierce stutter—d-d-d-day, he said—and Mary Tryphena was embarrassed to find herself so close to him. She shifted away, though not far enough to be out of reach.
The man she would marry opened his eyes for the first time then, turning his face toward her across the room. Those milky blue eyes settling on Mary Tryphena. Taking her in.

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