The Mooresie

Only occasionally do i feel moved to review something here.  Well, “moved” would be the wrong word, because sometimes i do it out of whimsy more than admiration, and ‘here’ might not refer to the current incarnation of this blog.  Anyways, after finishing Blackstrap Hawco i find myself wanting to say something.

i always imagined Annie Proulx writing The Shipping News barred up in a hotel room in St. John’s somewhere, experiencing and learning nothing, and still trying to pass off its portrayal of rural Newfoundland within the novel as authentic.  People don’t sit around in restaurants all day in rural Newfoundland, you know, even post-moratorium.  It’s all well and good that she needed an isolated environment to play her characters off of, i just wish she’d used one real to her, instead of claiming ours.

Ken Harvey, on the other hand, gets it.  Newfoundland – i am at a loss for a synonym here, “this province” or “this nation” or “this place” are not wide enough to fit the context –  is not a literary tool in his book, it is a frame.  Blackstrap Hawco captures the real Newfoundland, its history of isolation and deprivation and exploitation, its legends of perseverance and survival.  The title character is essentially set up as a Newfoundland messiah.  The history of Newfoundland, as expressed in the narrative by the experiences of his family and ancestors, is what makes him what he is and what motivates him to do what he does.  But he is also doomed by that history to fail, becoming another tragic ghost in a book full of ghosts.  In the end, though, Blackstrap Hawco joins the legends as well as the ghosts.

i wish everyone who read The Shipping News and thought it showed a quaint and interesting place would read Blackstrap Hawco.