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Summary
Summary
In a masterly debut, the award-winning poet and short-fiction writer Michael Crummey crafts a haunting novel set on the rugged coast of Newfoundland at the turn of the nineteenth century. Told in elegant, sensual prose, RIVER THIEVES Thieves is a richly imagined, historically provocative story about love, loss, and the heartbreaking compromises -- both personal and political -- that undermine lives.
In 1810, David Buchan, a naval officer, arrives in the Bay of Exploits with orders to establish contact with the Beothuk, or "Red Indians," the aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland, who are facing extinction. When Buchan approaches the area's most influential white settlers, the Peytons, for advice and assistance, he enters a shadowy world of allegiances and old grudges that he can only dimly apprehend. His closest ally, John Peyton Jr., maintains an uneasy balance between duty to his father -- a domineering patriarch with a reputation as a ruthless persecutor of the Beothuk -- and his troubled conscience. Cassie, the fiercely self-reliant and secretive woman who keeps the family house, walks a precarious line of her own between the unspoken but obvious hopes of the younger Peyton, her loyalty to John Senior, and a steadfast refusal to compromise her independence. When Buchan's peace expedition into "Indian country" goes awry, the rift between father and son deepens and begins todivide those closest to them.
Years later, when a second expedition to the Beothuk's winter camp mounted by the Peytons leads to the kidnapping of an Indian woman and the murder of her husband, Buchan returns to investigate. As the officer attempts to uncover what really happened at the Red Indians' lake, the delicate web of obligation and debt that holds together the Peyton household -- and the community of settlers on the northeastern shore -- slowly unravels.
The tragedy of miscommunication and loss among these colonists living in a harsh environment in a crude, violent age prefigures and in some sense is seen as the cause of the more profound loss, that of an entire people. An enthralling story of great passion and suspense, vividly set in the stark Newfoundland landscape and driven by an extraordinary cast of characters, RIVER THIEVES captures both the vast sweep of history and the intimate lives of those caught in its wake.
Author Notes
Michael Crummey was born in Buchans, Newfoundland, Canada on November 18, 1965. He received a BA in English from Memorial University in 1987. He pursued graduate work at Queen's University, but dropped out of the PhD program in 1989.
In 1986, he entered and won the Gregory J. Power Poetry Contest at Memorial University. He was first published in the St. John's-based literary mag TickleAce. In 1994, he won the inaugural Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry. His first book of poetry, Arguments with Gravity, was published in 1996 and won the Writer's Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry. His works include Hard Light, Emergency Roadside Assistance, and Flesh and Blood.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Trudging across the same harsh, icy fictional terrain that's fired the imagination of such writers as William Vollman, Andrea Barrett and Wayne Johnston, Crummey, an award-winning poet (Arguments with Gravity), has produced a poetic but ponderous tale of the colonization of Newfoundland and the last days of its Beothuk Indians. As the novel opens in 1810, grim family patriarch and homesteader John Senior (his face looks "hard enough to stop an axe") has kept up a hostile standoff with the Beothuk for years. But John Senior's blood feud with the Indians doesn't sit well with his idealistic son, John, with his spirited housekeeper, Cassie, or with David Buchan, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy who organizes a peacekeeping expedition to the Indian territories. When the mission goes awry and two soldiers are left headless in the snow, John Senior and the settlers set out to exact their revenge on the natives. Fitting for a book about history and the mapping of a lost world, Crummey's story is shaped by the vagaries of memory, perpetually circling back on itself to fill in narrative and historical details. And as is sometimes typical of a first novel by a seasoned poet, Crummey's story struggles to maintain momentum, dilating at length on the meaning and limitations of language. Each Beothuk word that survives, he writes, "has the heft of a museum artifact." The same might be said of Crummey's prose ("Fat dripped into the fire, the smell of it darkening the air like a bruise") and his characters' stilted behavior, which gives rise to a panorama of Newfoundland history and mythology as carefully composed but as lifeless as a dusty museum diorama. (June 19) Forecast: Strong advance praise for Crummey's novel (from Charles Frazier, among others) and enthusiastic reviews in Crummey's native Canada (the book was nominated for the prestigious Giller Prize there) should ensure extensive review coverage and attention in the U.S.. Whether sales will keep pace remains to be seen. 3-city author tour. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Based on historical events in Newfoundland just after the turn of the nineteenth century, poet and short story writer Crummey's first novel is the powerful story of colonial and native relations gone horribly wrong. John Peyton Sr. and his son, John Peyton, are trappers living in the colony with their housekeeper, Cassie. When Lieutenant David Buchan arrives on their doorstep, he seeks their cooperation in making friendly contact with the Beothuk Indians, who have been at odds with the colonists since their arrival. John Senior scoffs at the idea but helps to organize a group of men for the undertaking, including Joseph Reilly, a reformed thief, and Richmond and Taylor, two men who have been friends since their youth. But John Senior becomes ill, and it falls to John Peyton to join the expedition. The group makes contact, but their mission ends tragically. Years later, after their ship is stolen and vandalized, John Peyton and his father undertake another expedition to seek the Beothuk, this time abducting a young Beothuk woman. Buchan comes back into their lives when he is asked to investigate whether the Peytons were just in killing a Beothuk man who tried to prevent them from taking her. Crummey's debut is elaborate, jumping back and forth in time to explicate the characters' complicated backstories. Although his technique is somewhat jarring at first, Crummey deftly weaves together the many threads of his story to present a complex portrait of conflict fueled by misunderstandings and the flaws of those caught in its web. --Kristine Huntley
Kirkus Review
A little-known historical atrocity-the extinction of the Beothuk ("Red") Indians of central Newfoundland-becomes an authentic tragedy in this brilliantly constructed, immensely moving debut novel by an award-winning Canadian poet and short-story writer. The narrative, which covers roughly the years 1811-20, is assembled from both the viewpoints and extended reminiscences of four characters: Indian-hating fisherman John Peyton and his less truculent son and namesake; their strong-minded, self-educated housekeeper Cassie Jure (who is also John Junior's tutor); and David Buchan, the thoughtful British naval officer who is assigned to map the coastland, then Crown property, and also to investigate rumors "that attacks of inhuman barbarity were being perpetrated against the Indians by settlers." The fate of the Beothuks is all the more powerfully communicated because Crummey's text barely registers their presence (they're virtual shadows passing into oblivion), concentrating the effects of the settlers' treatment of them in the figure of "Mary," a Beothuk woman abducted during a violent raid thereafter shrouded in defensive secrecy. Lieutenant Buchan's painstaking reconstruction of a concealed history of theft (both Indians and settlers are, in their separate ways, "river thieves") and murder is expertly juxtaposed with the several interconnected stories of the aforementioned major characters, each of whom exhibits thoroughly convincing heroic potential and unconquerable crucially damaging human failings. Furthermore, Crummey shifts the focus so skillfully that the reader's attention and sympathies are seized by, and buffeted among, Cassie's ferocious hunger for the full life so long denied her; David Buchan's conflicted vacillations between duty and desire, sharpened by righteous anger; the elder John Peyton's ego-driven need to hold onto all he has left; and the sense of opportunities lost so stunningly encapsulated in young John Peyton's anguished final words: "All my life I've loved what didn't belong to me." There's a literary renaissance underway just north of us, and Crummey's quite literally astonishing debut novel is one of the brightest jewels in its crown.
Library Journal Review
In this first novel, conflict in a 19th-century Newfoundland household mirrors a larger crisis that leads to the extinction of the Beothuk Indians. Already an accomplished poet and short story writer, Newfoundland-born Crummey knows his territory and should have the skills to deliver. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Face of a Robber's Horse 1810 have the face of a robber's horse : to be brazen, without shame or pity. -- Dictionary of Newfoundland English O N E It was the sound of his father's voice that woke John Peyton, a half-strangled shouting across the narrow hall that separated the upstairs bedrooms in the winter house. They had moved over from the summer house near the cod fishing grounds on Burnt Island only two weeks before and it took him a moment to register where he was lying, the bed and the room made strange by the dark and the disorientation of broken sleep. He lay listening to the silence that always followed his father's nightmares, neither of the men shifting in their beds or making any other sound, both pretending they weren't awake. Peyton turned his head to the window where moonlight made the frost on the pane glow a pale, frigid white. In the morning he was leaving for the backcountry to spend the season on a trapline west of the River Exploits, for the first time running traps without his father. He'd been up half the night with the thought of going out on his own and there was no chance of getting back to sleep now. He was already planning his lines, counting sets in his head, projecting the season's take and its worth on the market. And underneath all of these calculations he was considering how he might approach Cassie when he came back to the house in the spring, borne down with furs like a branch ripe with fruit. A man in his own right finally. When he heard Cassie up and about downstairs in the kitchen, he pushed himself out of bed and broke the thin layer of ice that had formed over his bathing water and poured the basin full. His head ached from lack of sleep and from his mind having run in circles for hours. When he splashed his face and neck the cold seemed to narrow the blurry pulse of it and he bent at the waist to dip his head directly into the water, keeping it there as long as he could hold his breath. The kettle was already steaming when he made his way down to the kitchen. Cassie was scorching a panful of breakfast fish, the air dense with the sweet smoky drift of fried capelin. He sat at the table and stared across at her where she leaned over the fire, her face moving in and out of shadow like a leaf turning under sunlight. She didn't look up when he said good morning. "Get a good breakfast into you today," she said. "You'll need it." He nodded, but didn't answer her. She said, "Any sign of John Senior?" "I heard him moving about," he said, which was a lie, but he didn't want her calling him down just yet. It was the last morning he would see her for months and he wanted a few moments more alone in her company. "Father was on the run again last night," he said. "What do you think makes him so heatable in his sleep like that?" " O unseen shame, invisible disgrace! " Cassie said. She was still staring into the pan of capelin. " O unfelt sore, crest-wounding, private scar! " Some nonsense from her books. "Don't be speaking high-learned to me this time of the day," he said. She smiled across at him. He said, "You don't know no more than me, do you." "It's just the Old Hag, John Peyton. Some things don't bear investigating." She turned from the fire with the pan of capelin, carrying it across to the table. She shouted up at the ceiling for John Senior to come down to his breakfast. By the second hour of daylight, Peyton was packing the last of his provisions on the sledge outside the winter house while John Senior set about harnessing the dog. He was going to travel with Peyton as far as Ship Cove, a full day's walk into the mouth of the river, but both men were already uncomfortable with the thought of parting company. They were careful not to be caught looking at one another, kept their attention on the details of the job at hand. Peyton stole quick glimpses of his father as he worked over the dog. He was past sixty and grey-haired but there was an air of lumbering vitality to the man, a deliberate granite stubbornness. Lines across the forehead like runnels in a dry riverbed. The closely shaven face looked hard enough to stop an axe. Peyton had heard stories enough from other men on the shore to think his father had earned that look. It made him afraid for himself to dwell on what it was that shook John Senior out of sleep, set him screaming into the dark. His father said, "Mind you keep your powder dry." "All right," Peyton said. "Joseph Reilly's tilt is three or four miles south of your lines." "I know where Joseph Reilly is." "You run into trouble, you look in on him." "All right," he said again. There was still a sharp ache in his head, but it was spare and focused, like a single strand of heated wire running from one temple to the other. It added to the sense of urgency and purpose he felt. He'd come across to Newfoundland ten years before to learn the trades and to run the family enterprise when John Senior was ready to relinquish it. His father electing not to work the trapline this year was the first dim indication of an impending retirement. Peyton said, "I won't be coming out over Christmas." John Senior had set the dog on her side in the snow and was carefully examining her paws. "January then," he said, without raising his head. Peyton nodded. His father took a silver pocket watch from the folds of his greatcoat. He was working in the open air with bare hands and his fingers were bright with blood in the morning chill. "Half eight," he said. "You'd best say your goodbyes to Cassie. And don't tarry." Excerpted from River Thieves by Michael Crummey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
