Brick Books 50th Anniversary: Brilliant and Timeless Books to Take Another Look At—Hard Light

We’re delighted to continue our 50th anniversary series this month with Michael Crummey’s Hard Light. This edition is part of our classics series published in celebration of our 40th anniversary a decade ago! This month’s blog post is written by Matthew Hollett.

Michael Crummey’s Hard Light

by Matthew Hollett

After my grandparents died, my father cleaned out their modest home in Little Harbour East. The stacks of cardboard boxes and furniture he trucked home across the island ended up in our basement – specifically in my bedroom, which had formerly been a storage room.

Among their belongings I found a strange radio. Flicking its switch summoned an automated voice that would recite, endlessly and in exhausting detail, the maritime weather forecast: wind speeds and directions, high and low temperatures, barometric pressure, cloud conditions, fog and storm warnings, each data point annotated with a location and time zone. Uninterrupted by commercial jingles or pop song countdowns, the device simply emitted a list of urgent observations about the world.

I’m reminded of that battered black box when I tune into Michael Crummey’s Hard Light. The book’s voice emanates as if from a past world, yet the things it has to say are uncannily current. It offers lists, instructions and accounts of miracles and mishaps with a certain authoritative detachment – its voice can’t be described as emotional, but emotion seeps in around its edges, in the sheer humanity and generosity of its task.

Hard Light draws on the voice and stories of Crummey’s father, and on stories of friends and relations. Its prose verges on and sometimes shifts into poetry – “full of rhythms and turns of phrase that have been hammered smooth through the telling and retelling,” as Lisa Moore notes in her evocative introduction to the 2015 edition. Spliced into these stories are passages that play with found language: journal entries, instructions, property deeds, lists of place names. These sources, verifiable or invented, lend the text a certain authenticity.

I especially admire the first of the three sections, “32 Little Stories,” with its beguiling series of vignettes, anecdotes, memories, diary entries, recipes, reveries. “Two people should never say the word love before they’ve eaten a sack of flour together.” With subsections titled Water, Earth, Fire and Air, “32 Little Stories” deftly surveys the materiality and routines of life in Newfoundland a hundred years ago – as well as the ways that each of these four elements might kill you.

“Discovering Darkness,” the book’s second section, reimagines the diary of Captain John Froude (1863-1939). Crummey spelunks through his source material, polishing shards of memoir into shining poems, as in the indelible image of a magic lantern slide’s shimmering projection on a ship’s sail: “London Bridge, / the length of it shaken by / a rare gust of wind.” Even in this section, with its origins in a singular historical account, the book’s voice conjures a shifting chorus of travelers and storytellers.

Hard Light’s third section, “A Map of the Islands,” charts a modern-day voyage on the Labrador coastal ferry. Places visited along the way send Crummey spiralling again into history: a whaling station, a Cold War radar base, a Moravian church, a cemetery. “The remains of a hundred whalers interred on Saddle Island, their heads facing west, a row of stones weighed on their chests as if to submerge them in the shallow pool of earth, to keep them from coming up for air.”

Some of the most startling moments in Hard Light are its photographs: a child with enormous hands; a pair of faceless women distorted as if by some airborne maelstrom; a succession of sturdy characters plunked down in townscapes seemingly made from toothpicks and crumpled paper. The only image in the book without a person standing in the centre is the one showing a coffin. Each photograph is an open window I can’t linger at too long, as if an icy breeze drifts in from its frame.

The first time I read Hard Light, I was surprised to discover a personal connection – my aunt Pam’s name appears in the acknowledgements, thanked for her stories. I realized then why one tale in particular (a fanciful anecdote about a zeppelin) had seemed vaguely familiar. But of course anyone who grew up in or around outport Newfoundland can lay claim to that same feeling, as Crummey’s stories swell with folktale and collective memory, contoured by the knack for storytelling that comes as easy as air here.

And with one last skim through the text as I write this, another echo: My grandfather’s wireless resurfaces in Crummey’s narrator’s description of the one his grandfather paid seventy-five dollars for: “The dark mahogany radio sits expressionless in the kitchen, a little Buddha, contemplating silence.”

About Michael Crummey

Michael Crummey is an internationally celebrated novelist and poet; he has published nine books of poetry and fiction. Galore won the Canadian Authors Association’s Fiction Award, the Commonwealth Prize (Canada and Caribbean Region), and was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the Governor General’s Award. Sweetland was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in 2014. His most recent poetry collection is Under the Keel (Anansi, 2013). He lives in St. John’s.