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Gaffer: A Novel of Newfoundland

by Kevin Major

Shorn of his duties to the teen set, Kevin Major, a Newfoundland writer best known for his YA fiction, neglects the elements that typically make a novel work: clarity, story, character. Instead, he indulges style and form in Gaffer, his second book for adults. Subtitled “a novel of Newfoundland,” Major takes his readers through the island’s past and future on the heels of Gaffer, a daft and raging fish-boy.

The story begins in the present, as Gaffer escapes to his favourite hideaway, his uncle’s shed, just as the family van heads for the mainland. He feels lost, but valiantly keeps his chin up for his mother, who sheds a few tears over her son’s lot in life, and his grandmother, who bakes a batch of pastries. Gaffer then takes to the sea, his true love, his real home.

It is in the ocean that Gaffer thrives – able to stay submerged for what seems like days, to dive without leaving a ripple of entry. It’s uncertain whether these special talents are hyperbolized, but this confusion is allayed when the narration finally admits to fantasy. Gaffer converses with the cod, and reticently falls in love with a 1,000-year-old nymph, and in each new chapter emerges from the ocean at a different point in Newfoundland’s history. He meets his father for the last time at the oil rig explosion of 1982; he sees his mother carted off by a record producer intent on making her a “seafaring-country” star in 1999; he defies Cabot in 1497 with a stinging, “Yours not the first pair of eyes, Caboto!” He tearfully takes in Newfoundland’s transformation to a glittering memorial theme park in 2041.

Tracing Newfoundland’s initial glory – plentiful fish, robust women, men with purpose – as it deteriorates into a barren landscape, robbed of its riches and natives, is Major’s focus, and Gaffer rails boldly against the Spaniards and the fisherman. But his preposterous dialogue – “There’ll be no lack of West Country blood willing to root themselves in this place” – and inability for expression more subtle than bile make Gaffer’s journey a tiresome chronicle of confrontations.

Major’s heavily poetic style does provide some situations that are colourful and original and linger longer than the moment, but overall it’s difficult to connect with this earnest, humourless work. The unsympathetic and undeveloped protagonist caught in a netherworld neither magical nor comprehensible makes this potentially imaginative tale seem both stagnant and overwrought.

 

Reviewer: Sheila Heti

Publisher: Doubleday

DETAILS

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 208 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-385-3567-1

Released: June

Issue Date: 1997-7

Categories: Fiction: Novels