2002 Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award Shortlist: In River Thieves, his first novel, poet and short-story writer Michael Crummey reaches far into Newfoundland's past to tell one of the colony's most tragic stories: the extermination of the Beothuk people. Through the lives and reminiscences of some of the colony's most prominent European residents--David Buchan, a naval explorer and idealist who attempts to bring the isolated Beothuks into productive contact with the British Empire; John Peyton Jr., the obedient son of a relentlessly patriarchal local trader; Cassie Jure, John Peyton Sr.'s literate, aloof housekeeper; and Joseph Reilly, a transported Irish thief and a genuinely decent trapper--Crummey recounts a halfhearted attempt, foiled by the colony's petty tensions, to save the Beothuks.

River Thieves is an oddly meandering novel, and this is its greatest appeal. Rather than offering a grisly, guilt-ridden adventure story that rushes from its suitably portentous beginning to its inevitably sombre end, Crummey works with a meandering sort of history, one that has to go over the same events a few times before they begin to give up their secrets, temporarily leaving his readers as disoriented as his benighted characters. The book's real heart--the Beothuks--never becomes fully articulate; the Beothuks remain buried on the shore, or encamped among the snows of Red Indian Lake. Anyone who wants this kind of story to come equipped with heroes and, perhaps, even answers, should turn to Rudy Wiebe, but Crummey's labyrinthine approach has its own distinct appeal. --Jack Illingworth


From Publishers Weekly
Trudging across the same harsh, icy fictional terrain that's fired the imagination of such writers as William Vollman, Andrea Barrett and Wayne Johnston, Crummey, an award-winning poet (Arguments with Gravity), has produced a poetic but ponderous tale of the colonization of Newfoundland and the last days of its Beothuk Indians. As the novel opens in 1810, grim family patriarch and homesteader John Senior (his face looks "hard enough to stop an axe") has kept up a hostile standoff with the Beothuk for years. But John Senior's blood feud with the Indians doesn't sit well with his idealistic son, John, with his spirited housekeeper, Cassie, or with David Buchan, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy who organizes a peacekeeping expedition to the Indian territories. When the mission goes awry and two soldiers are left headless in the snow, John Senior and the settlers set out to exact their revenge on the natives. Fitting for a book about history and the mapping of a lost world, Crummey's story is shaped by the vagaries of memory, perpetually circling back on itself to fill in narrative and historical details. And as is sometimes typical of a first novel by a seasoned poet, Crummey's story struggles to maintain momentum, dilating at length on the meaning and limitations of language. Each Beothuk word that survives, he writes, "has the heft of a museum artifact." The same might be said of Crummey's prose ("Fat dripped into the fire, the smell of it darkening the air like a bruise") and his characters' stilted behavior, which gives rise to a panorama of Newfoundland history and mythology as carefully composed but as lifeless as a dusty museum diorama.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In this first novel, conflict in a 19th-century Newfoundland household mirrors a larger crisis that leads to the extinction of the Beothuk Indians. Already an accomplished poet and short story writer, Newfoundland-born Crummey knows his territory and should have the skills to deliver. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Based on historical events in Newfoundland just after the turn of the nineteenth century, poet and short story writer Crummey's first novel is the powerful story of colonial and native relations gone horribly wrong. John Peyton Sr and his son, John Peyton, are trappers living in the colony with their housekeeper, Cassie. When Lieutenant David Buchan arrives on their doorstep, he seeks their cooperation in making friendly contact with the Beothuk Indians, who have been at odds with the colonists since their arrival. John Senior scoffs at the idea but helps to organize a group of men for the undertaking, including Joseph Reilly, a reformed thief, and Richmond and Taylor, two men who have been friends since their youth. But John Senior becomes ill, and it falls to John Peyton to join the expedition. The group makes contact, but their mission ends tragically. Years later, after their ship is stolen and vandalized, John Peyton and his father undertake another expedition to seek the Beothuk, this time abducting a young Beothuk woman. Buchan comes back into their lives when he is asked to investigate whether the Peytons were just in killing a Beothuk man who tried to prevent them from taking her. Crummey's debut is elaborate, jumping back and forth in time to explicate the characters' complicated backstories. Although his technique is somewhat jarring at first, Crummey deftly weaves together the many threads of his story to present a complex portrait of conflict fueled by misunderstandings and the flaws of those caught in its web. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
". . . [N]oble and mysterious . . ." --Mark Rozzo


Review
". . . [N]oble and mysterious . . ." --Mark Rozzo


Book Description
In a masterly debut, the award-winning poet and short-fiction writer Michael Crummey crafts a haunting novel set on the rugged coast of Newfoundland at the turn of the nineteenth century. Told in elegant, sensual prose, RIVER THIEVES Thieves is a richly imagined, historically provocative story about love, loss, and the heartbreaking compromises -- both personal and political -- that undermine lives.In 1810, David Buchan, a naval officer, arrives in the Bay of Exploits with orders to establish contact with the Beothuk, or "Red Indians," the aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland, who are facing extinction. When Buchan approaches the area's most influential white settlers, the Peytons, for advice and assistance, he enters a shadowy world of allegiances and old grudges that he can only dimly apprehend. His closest ally, John Peyton Jr., maintains an uneasy balance between duty to his father -- a domineering patriarch with a reputation as a ruthless persecutor of the Beothuk -- and his troubled conscience. Cassie, the fiercely self-reliant and secretive woman who keeps the family house, walks a precarious line of her own between the unspoken but obvious hopes of the younger Peyton, her loyalty to John Senior, and a steadfast refusal to compromise her independence. When Buchan's peace expedition into "Indian country" goes awry, the rift between father and son deepens and begins to divide those closest to them.Years later, when a second expedition to the Beothuk's winter camp mounted by the Peytons leads to the kidnapping of an Indian woman and the murder of her husband, Buchan returns to investigate. As the officer attempts to uncover what really happened at the Red Indians' lake, the delicate web of obligation and debt that holds together the Peyton household -- and the community of settlers on the northeastern shore -- slowly unravels.The tragedy of miscommunication and loss among these colonists living in a harsh environment in a crude, violent age prefigures and in some sense is seen as the cause of the more profound loss, that of an entire people. An enthralling story of great passion and suspense, vividly set in the stark Newfoundland landscape and driven by an extraordinary cast of characters, RIVER THIEVES captures both the vast sweep of history and the intimate lives of those caught in its wake.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In 1810, David Buchan, a naval officer, arrives in the Bay of Exploits with orders to establish contact with the Beothuk, or "Red Indians," the aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland, who are facing extinction. When Buchan approaches the area's most influential white settlers, the Peytons, for advice and assistance, he enters a shadowy world of allegiances and old grudges that he can only dimly apprehend. His closest ally, John Peyton Jr., maintains an uneasy balance between duty to his father - a domineering patriarch with a reputation as a ruthless persecutor of the Beothuk - and his troubled conscience. Cassie, the fiercely self-reliant and secretive woman who keeps the family house, walks a precarious line of her own between the unspoken but obvious hopes of the younger Peyton, her loyalty to John Senior, and a steadfast refusal to compromise her independence. When Buchan's expedition into "Indian country" goes awry, the rift between father and son deepens and begins to divide those closest to them." Years later, when a second expedition to the Beothuk's winter camp mounted by the Peytons leads to the kidnapping of an Indian woman and the murder of her husband, Buchan returns to investigate. As the officer attempts to uncover what really happened at the Red Indian's lake, the delicate web of obligation and debt that holds together the Peyton household - the community of settlers on the northeastern shore - slowly unravels.

FROM THE CRITICS

Patrick Lane

The eloquent simplicity goes straight to the heart.

Toronto Star

Michael Crummey's Hard Light will catch and hold you in a place where the ocean is something you recognize

Alistair MacLeod

“This is a splendid novel reflective of a particular place and time. Michael Crummey is a tremendously gifted writer.

Globe and Mail

The pieces [in Hard Light] reflect artistic intelligence in their shape and rhythm and in their structural relation to the book as a whole… Each piece is resonant… Rich in specific detail

Quill & Quire