His obstinacy prevents his friends and neighbours from collecting the government’s money, tearing apart the tight-knit community as a result.Ĭrummey tells us the stories that make up Sweetland. He is determined to stay, no matter the cost. The title character, Moses Sweetland, is one of two holdouts refusing to take up the government’s seemingly generous offer. In a resurrection of Newfoundland’s mid-twentieth century resettlement program, the money will only be paid if every resident of the community agrees to leave. In it, Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial government, flush with oil money in 2012, is offering $100,000 to each household in the shrinking and expensive-to-maintain island outport of Sweetland – not to improve or renew the community, but to destroy it. Soon, all that will remain will be a ghostly assembly like the one that closes Michael Crummey’s Sweetland – a scene reminiscent of some of David Blackwood’s bleaker prints, first understood as memorial but now revealed as prophecy.Ĭrummey’s latest novel left me with a sadness I have trouble translating into words. In a couple of decades, a generation at most, dozens of Newfoundland communities will have disappeared, and there seems to be no way to reverse the flow.
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May 2023
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