Among other things, The Innocents, by Michael Crummey, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, losing out to Reproduction by Ian Williams. I never wrote anything here about Reproduction. You know what they say: if you can’t say anything good … I note a single laconic entry in my personal journal: “No sparks.” Having finished Crummey’s book, I’m in a better position now to say that the wrong person won the prize. While Reproduction is a good novel, I found it ragged around the edges, like a first draft crying out for more attention. By contrast, The Innocents is a good novel that has the benefit of polish.
You can make shirts of the finest cut, but if the fabric is woven from coarse thread, it will still be unwearable. Conversely, you can spin the finest thread and weave it into the most luxuriant fabric, but if the resulting clothes are ill-fitting, again, they are unwearable. But if your cloth is woven from a fine thread and if the shirts you sew from it are a perfect fit, well then … It’s hard for me to say what you have. It communicates itself more as a feeling than as a knowing.
With The Innocents, Crummey spins out beautiful words to create a near-perfect novel. On May 11th, I posted a poem here as a complaint about my inherited language, the prosaic and functional English of the Toronto business world which has the effect of flattening the imagination. Based in St. John’s, I suspect Crummey experiences the English language (and it shapes his imagination) in utterly different ways. This, at least, is what I infer from the way his words ring.
When approaching Crummey, a good place to begin is his 2016 anthology of poetry, Little Dogs, a consolidation of the best pieces from four previously published works along with 23 new poems. Two things are immediately apparent. The first is the musicality of his language. This may in part be a gift of his birthplace. Its language inhabits him in a way that takes him as far as one can get from the utilitarian prose of a Toronto memo. The second is that most of his poems are narratives, or at least imply narratives. In other words, in his poetry he tells stories, and in his prose his stories are infused with poetry.
The Innocents opens with the deaths in quick succession of a mother and father, leaving behind the children, Evered and Ada, to make their way in a remote cove on the north shore of Newfoundland. Their situation is summed up on the fifth page:
They were left together in the cove then with its dirt-floored stud tilt, with its garden of root vegetables and its scatter of outbuildings, with its looming circle of hills and rattling brook and its view of the ocean’s grey expanse beyond the harbour skerries. The cove was the heart and sum of all creation in their eyes and they were alone there with the little knowledge of the world passed on haphazard and gleaned by chance.
A few simple lines at the outset establish the whole of the novel: isolation, innocence, knowledge.
For the orphaned children, there is no assurance of survival. They live by their wits, the memory of their parents’ habits, and by the generosity of strangers whose rare appearances offer hints of a wide world beyond the cove. Innocence is the natural state of children and it is in part a function of ignorance. The question here is: how long can ignorance be sustained without warping the innocence into an evil parody of itself?
Inevitably, the children pass through puberty and experience a rising awareness of themselves as sexual beings, most notably through Evered’s struggles with masturbation, and with the arrival of Ada’s monthly “visitor.” The knowledge of good and evil does not make its appearance in the form of an apple proffered by a snake, but in the form of an ice-bound ship stranded just beyond the cove. The children trek across the ice to investigate and Evered discovers something horrifying which he refuses to share with his sister. Ada only learns of it later when a visiting ship’s captain reads to her from a journal they had retrieved from a dead passenger. As with other deprivations, illiteracy has sustained their innocence beyond its natural bounds. As it must, knowledge has its way.
One could go on about the universal—almost Biblical—quality of the themes Crummey explores here. But if there is anything I’ve learned from the practice of Biblical exegesis, it’s that the hypnotic effect of universal appeal never did anyone any good. Context matters. As with the Bible, so with novels. A novel that toys with high themes is useless if it doesn’t simultaneously speak to readers in their context. That’s a test I always apply when I read a novel: does it have anything to say to me where I sit here and now?
Where I sit here and now is in self-isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic. As a Canadian, I enjoy the benefits of a well-funded, well-organized public health care system within the context of a functional federalism that works in a collaborative spirit with provincial governments in a way that largely transcends partisan politics. Nevertheless, our news cycle and social media are dominated by the horror show south of our border.
Most of us, wherever we find ourselves in the world, have met the call to isolation. But in the US, isolation is writ large as isolationism. In a strange way, American isolationism assumes a mantel of innocence, albeit a violent innocence sustained by an unrelenting assault on knowledge. We witness this assault in the systematic defunding of public education, the eroding freedoms of the press, and the onslaught of propaganda and disinformation.
Through The Innocents, Michael Crummey creates a microcosm in which the triangle of isolation, innocence and ignorance can be spun out as an allegory which speaks to us precisely in the here and now. He wrote it before Covid-19 so he could not have anticipated its salience to our current situation. Then again, Covid-19 isn’t really the critical issue before us; what is proving most problematic is the human heart and the evil it can harbour. There is no one better positioned to offer guidance in such matters than a skilled novelist.