The codless seas

Newfoundland and Labrador have syddered much hardship, most recently the disappearance of the cod industry, a mainstay of livelihood. And yet John Gimlette's beautifully written book is neither dark nor depressing writes Elizabeth Royte

If Newfoundland's once vast bounty of cod was God's gift to European colonisers, then Newfoundlanders themselves must be God's gift to travel writers. In John Gimlette's frothy treatment, the island is absolutely teeming with impossibly colourful characters spouting non-stop entertainment. Essentially an exploration of the provincial psyche, Theatre of Fish: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador starts out in the capital, St. John's, where Gimlette develops the conceit that the province is a theater overrun by its audience.

"Everybody had a speech or a song or a little act," he writes. "Dramas simply tumbled out of people, complete with prologues, heckling, applause and curtain calls." This explains why the book is organized into acts and scenes, and ends with both an epilogue and an afterword, as if Gimlette, who probably wouldn't be out of place on the boards himself, couldn't quite let his audience go.

Around Newfoundland, north to Labrador and back again, Gimlette is a magnet for the cracked and the contagious, who tell us, in ways obvious and subtle, that the provincial character has been shaped by hardships without end: brutal weather, grinding poverty, bloody politics, clueless leaders and, most recently, codless seas. Newfoundlanders had "little sense of destiny, just relief that they'd survived this far". Between 1954 and 1975, more than 250 outports, or fishing villages, were abandoned, and 50,000 people deserted Newfoundland in the decade after the cod fishery closed in 1992.

Lawlessness is a persistent theme, along with anger at the government and a pervasive sense of failure. And yet this isn't a dark or depressing book: it's a little bit nutty, always beautifully written, and brimming with Gimlette's appreciation for the landscape and those who inhabit it.

As in his acclaimed first book, "At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay", Gimlette leads us, in fits and starts, to match his journey, through the province's convoluted history. The narrative isn't always easy to follow, partly because it's intrinsically confusing. Every act contains some heated conflict, between Catholics and Protestants, English and French, liberals and tories, Indians and missionaries, confederates and patriots, merchants and fishermen. What is everyone fighting over? Everything from turf and fishing grounds to schools, religion, the right to perform mummery and whales.

Traveling in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, a medical missionary who set out in 1893 expecting "a little light teeth-pulling and evangelism", Gimlette travels by rental car, bus and ferry. He would have tried hitchhiking, but the agent at the tourist office warned him against it.

"'You might do something, sexually assault someone. . . .'", I must have looked surprised.

"'Or they might sexually assault you'", these gifts to the writer are constant, and Gimlette is laugh-out-loud funny. His nature is to be thrilled, not put off, by the unruly and the odd. He's delighted by an ancient fisherman who cohabits with sheep and subsists on seaweed. And he understands the narrative value, if not always the pleasures, of a stormy evening spent cabin-bound with two dim-witted drunks ("babies with red whiskers, perhaps, or experiments thrown up by the sea"), of appalling weather, dogs so hungry they'll devour hymn books, moose that crash into his tent, and the interior's dense and featureless forests, in which children are constantly getting lost (and found). A freak magnet, all Gimlette need do is arrive, and the schemers and dreamers appear from the molly fodge (lichen) and mish (heath) to spill their tales. Is it all for real? "Believing the stories wasn't half as important as the way they were told." Then again, Gimlette might have misunderstood half of what he heard. Newfoundlanders speak 66 dialects, he reports. Some voices were reminiscent of sea gulls. One old crabman sounded "like Irish rinsed in shingle", mummers jabbered "in Dorset and walrus", and the conversation of poachers sounded like "West Country strained through a gale". In the outports, Gimlette finds a way of life barely changed for 400 years: bare-boned houses built by hand, residents happily surviving off caribou and sea birds. Many villages, with "schools for three and bars for one", have no police presence or doctor, and depend on a weekly supply boat. When even that lifeline is canceled, outporters stoically float their saltboxes to another cove, "dodging the feuds and finding the sun". Gimlette evokes much in few words. The Minister of Fish "wafted me into a slug of leather". A bungalow "glowed like a cheese". At a party, there were "little trails of grandchildren and turkey over every surface". On a bus, he meets a passenger with "an ear so loathingly pierced that it could probably be unzipped in times of trouble and stashed away until things improved". In a few places the author gets carried away with these descriptions, and his frippery undermines comprehension. (For example: A cathedral looks like a cave, but "instead of bats, it was decorated with local politicians, all spouting rainwater in times of civic urgency.") He has a habit of starting scenes with a cryptic, apparently foreshadowing, sentence. It's meant to be dramatic, but sometimes it's a little confusing.

Most of "Theatre of Fish" is larkily lighthearted, as if Gimlette were whistling in the province's eternal dark. But one act, sad beyond measure, defies even his optimism. In Labrador, the author finds the native people living in smashed towns defined by alcoholism, murder and suicide. Having lost their old customs – hunting and migration – and rituals, they despise the new ways, in which they're utterly dependent on the government. Gimlette doesn't know what to make of the situation. "It was easy enough to ascertain the different parts but I could never assemble the whole." He's fine with that, but fears he's become impervious to the place's horror. "Perhaps the voyager is no more than the voyeur, seeking pain and beauty that's always someone else's?" Gimlette isn't one for summing up. His great-grandfather trekked through the region to enact reform; Gimlette, a hapless audience member, came merely to observe. Whether the drama of Newfoundland and Labrador is comedy or tragedy, he wisely refuses to say.

© New York Times