Title: Sweetland Author: Michael Crummey
Published: January 19, 2015
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 336
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:The scarcely populated town of Sweetland rests on the shore of a remote Canadian island. Its slow decline finally reaches a head when the mainland government offers each islander a generous resettlement package—the sole stipulation being that everyone must leave. Fierce and enigmatic Moses Sweetland, whose ancestors founded the village, is the only one to refuse. As he watches his neighbors abandon the island, he recalls the town’s rugged history and its eccentric cast of characters. Evoking The Shipping News, Michael Crummey—one of Canada’s finest novelists—conjures up the mythical, sublime world of Sweetland’s past amid a stormbattered landscape haunted by local lore. As in his critically acclaimed novel Galore, Crummey masterfully weaves together past and present, creating in Sweetland a spectacular portrait of one man’s battle to survive as his environment vanishes around him.
Michael Crummey’s Sweetland was a difficult novel for me, not because I didn’t like it or because I had serious issues with it, but because I felt more ambiguous about it than anything else. I lean towards liking it overall, but I really can’t be sure. I’m very uncertain.
It was definitely hard going at first, I felt. Crummey’s style makes extremely heavy use of fragments—I’d say at least 25% of the sentences in Sweetland were fragments, usually participial phrases that didn’t modify anything. I’d find myself reading an “-ing” verb on its own, grow confused, then have to go back and read the sentence over to understand that it was an on-purpose fragment, not a trick my eyes played on me. This made reading in the early stages slow, as I had to grow accustomed to the author’s particular style. By the end I didn’t notice so many fragments, either because there weren’t so many, or because I’d become accustomed to them.
Another difficult, almost alienating, aspect of the book was the characters’ dialect, a very unique form of English that has developed in this coastal Newfoundland community due to isolation from wider society. On the one hand, I felt this gave the narrative a definite note of authenticity, and I was able to “place” the characters much more easily. On the other hand, this dialect sometimes made the dialogue in Sweetland inaccessible in a way—as a reader I felt very much the outsider in this story, and I never, honestly, felt invited in.
Because of this, I found myself emotionally distant from the story in a way I’m not familiar with, and I also found—whether because of the prose or the lack of strong character connection—that certain emotionally tense moments in the book weren’t emphasized as they should have been. A couple of these scenes were so easily lost in the tide of words and paragraphs that I almost missed them, which was frustrating for me as a reader, because if, say, the main character’s pet and only companion dies in a not-so-nice way, I want to feel that. I want that to hurt. But in Sweetland I didn’t feel anything.
I did like the community of Sweetland itself, and how it was presented by the author. There are only a handful of residents on the island, and Moses Sweetland knows them all intimately. The dynamics in the town were interesting to me, and I did feel that Crummey did an excellent job making that aspect real but also just a little bit bizarre.
Another thing I did like about the book was the more inconcrete conclusion, one that left things open. I have my own ideas about what happens to Moses Sweetland, but perhaps another reader would have another take on it. Vague or open endings are always my favorite in stories, so long as there’s enough information for the reader to draw some sort of conclusion, and I feel that Sweetland provided that for me.
As I said, I’m not 100% sure where I stand in regards to this book. It’s just one of those reads that, for me, didn’t do much for me either way. Which is fine. I don’t have to have an opinion on every book I read, and Sweetland is more than free to remain an enigma to me.
