In his other incarnation, Newfoundland singer-songwriter Wayne Bartlett’s most popular song chronicles the closure of the Newfoundland fishery. In Louder than the Sea, his first novel, he tackles similarly political subjects: the necessity of the seal hunt and the shame of the forced resettlement of the residents of tiny outports.

Fourteen-year-old Martin has not adapted well to resettlement. Ambrose, his father, chides him about his laziness; Ida, his mother, tries to keep the two males from fighting constantly. His grandmother Kizzie is Eastern gothic at its weirdest – a cackling old woman so in love with chewing gum she’ll pluck it out of the mouths of those around her.

Against this rich cast of characters, Bartlett sets the annual seal hunt, in which Martin participates for the first time. What follows is an exhaustive report of a day on the ice – how hard it is to smoke a cigarette in the cutting wind, the tools and method for seal hunting, how to bring them home behind a snowmobile, and so on. The writing here is fine – that the landscape is bred in Bartlett’s bones is obvious – but it suffers a surfeit of unnecessary detail. Bartlett has some important things to say about Newfoundland, and he says them in an often lyrical way, but in this case, less would have been more.

The pace picks up, at last, when Martin returns to the island outport of his childhood, which now consists of two abandoned houses, his father’s and a neighbour’s. Martin gets trapped on the island when the ice breaks up, and after Ambrose is stranded alongside him in a failed rescue attempt, the reader rightly expects character development to ensue. Unfortunately, little does. In the end, each character is as unchanged and unlikeable as he was in the beginning.