Interview with Michael Crummey
A World is Lost
"The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct...." Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct
Extinction forever bleeds tragedy. The aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland, the Beothuk, numbered between 500 and 5,000 before the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s. The cumulative effects of disease, violence and loss of habitat devastated them, and by 1829 they were gone.
It is this tragedy that informs the ethos of River Thieves, a great new work by Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey. The novel reflects this immense loss by invoking, at its beginning, a few words known from the Beothuk language – whashwitt, bear; kosweet, caribou; dogajavick, fox; shabathoobet, trap. There are only enough words left to point to a language lost, a way of knowing vanished. As Crummey writes, "Only the land is still there."
River Thieves is a powerful tragedy in part because of its inevitability – it convinces us of several possibilities, but only one reality; it unwittingly argues that although its outcome is one potential of many, it was inescapable. Part of this result was due to the complex nature of Crummey's research.
"I was most surprised," he admits, "at the range of attitudes about the Beothuk at the time. I really expected it to be fairly homogenous. There was racism of the sort that considered the Beothuk not as humans, but as animals, but there were the rare voices who said ‘the land belongs to the Beothuk.' Even within that range of attitudes, however, the racism still existed – they may have been humans with rights, but they were still savages to whom civilization needed to be brought. That was the reason for the initial expedition of the book."
As Crummey explores the effect his research had on his story, he grows truly pensive: "The more I learned, the more I realized that the story of the Beothuk was not in black and white. All shades of grey, you know. Everybody was complicit at some point.
"And I think that's true of people – I don't know of anybody who's sort of a black or white person. I think shades of grey are different; some are lighter or darker, but I think everybody has a story."
Indeed, all the bodies of River Thieves have a story. There is John Peyton Jr., the protoganist apparent, embattled with his conscience and a racist father; there is Cassie, a woman of formidable intellectual powers who keeps their house and threads the line between loyalty and independence; there is Buchan, the British officer possessed of a near verbatim dedication to British law, who finds he must flout this same law if he is to keep his position. Each of these, and each minor character, is a thief of a different, roundly filling out the promise of the novel's title.
For Crummey, the story is about regret. "Each character is in some way trapped by his or her past. For them the past isn't something that happened back there, it's something that's still happening to these people. In some way that mirrors how Newfoundlanders had to deal with the Beothuk. It happened 200 years ago, but it's still right there. It's part of what we had to deal with in our sense of who we are."
The impact of River Thieves lies not merely in its apparent inevitability, but in its revelation that the historical tragedy of the Beothuk could have been much different. "Thieves is in some ways obsessed with story – how it is told, how it reveals its teller. The great loss of the Beothuk is not just the physical death of those people, but the loss of their story," he says. Within the world of Thieves, the Beothuk must be lost, but in the reality it reflects, they could have persevered – in a word, a sentence, a lyric.
Crummey, who has been nominated for the Giller Prize, ends with a telling truth: "The songs at the end of the book, we know they had those songs on just about everything they had in their life. But we don't know any of the lyrics to those songs, we don't know the music. We just have that empty space that they need to occupy." |
