Theatre of Fish: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador

by John Gimlette

Overview

Newfoundland is one of the most intriguing places in North America, a land of breathtaking but cruel beauty, populated by some of the saltiest, oddest characters you’ll ever find. In Theatre of Fish, John Gimlette vividly describes the dense forests and forbidding coastlines and recounts the colorful and often tragic history of the region. He introduces us to the inhabitants, from the birds and moose to the descendants of the outlaws, deserters, and fishermen who settled this eastern edge of North America. Leavened with irreverence and affection, this is an irresistible portrait of life in extremis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400078530
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/14/2006
Series:	Vintage Departures Series
Pages:	402
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.01(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

John Gimlette is a well-established travel writer, having won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and the Wanderlust Travel Writing Award. He writes regularly for a number of broadsheets. His first book, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay, was published in 2003 to massive critical acclaim. When not probing the extreme corners of the Earth he practices as a barrister in London.

Read an Excerpt

I’ve suddenly realised that every one of my visits to St John’s began and ended with The Narrows.
This channel, no wider than a shout, linked the harbour to the sea. The gap through which it passed was like a crack in a sky full of granite. As fissures go, it was simply mesmerising. The whole city faced it, as if watching a door ajar. Out there was weather, the Old World, shades of darkness and ice. In here, life had a more turquoise texture, and smelt of potatoes and fresh-cut pine. As a natural portal, it had defined the beginning and end of journeys for centuries. These were the most easterly rocks of the Americas and the beginning — or end — of the New World. The French, when Newfoundland was briefly theirs, had called it Le Goulet — The Throat — a name that was nicely sinister and functionally perfect. From its place in the hills, St John’s watched, waiting to see who’d sail in next.

I often found myself plodding round the harbour, responding to some primordial urge to be uphill, up in the rocks. First, I would climb through The Batteries, several layers of Victorian artillery; Inner, Outer, Middle, Upper, Lower. These old dug-outs had long been colonised by eccentrics, people living in driftwood cottages and flotsam. I always imagined that their proximity to the wild, gnashing sea had left them a little distracted. Their homes dangled over the black froth and they themselves were given to some curly pronouncements: ‘Inteligence not Educasion!’ said a sign, or
‘CANADA = NEWFOUNDLAND’S NEWEST COLONY’

Every now and then — and most dramatically in 1959 — the walls of The Narrows crumbled, crushed these dwellings and swept them out to sea. When that happened, the Battery people reacted as all Newfoundlanders did in times of wrecked homes; they simply went out into the woods and cut themselves new ones.

As I climbed higher, the broader picture emerged. St John’s just about filled the foreground. Although I would become very fond of this city of planks and ship’s paint, it told terrible lies about its age and size. It was not, as it claimed, the oldest city in North America (for that was to overlook — among others — Mexico City) nor had its population ever reached much beyond 100,000. But it behaved like a capital and, from up here, I could see two cathedrals, a Supreme Court and a miniature government.

Beyond St John’s, I fancied that I could see into the heart of the island. This was, of course, an absurd thought; Newfoundland is the size of Ohio or England. All I was looking at were the soggy hinterlands — the barrens — where Johnsmen went on week-ends for boil-ups, gunning and perhaps a little grassing.

If I turned and faced the other way, up the great gulley, I could see the draggers running for home, each beneath a helix of seabirds. In winter, the horizon would be speckled with ice and, in summer, a crease of brilliant blue. Had I been here on 9th July 1882 — on the cusp of Spring — I might have spotted the Albert. She was picking her way through the last knobs of ice, Grenfell on the fore-deck, troubled by the smell of burning.

Editorial Reviews

“Newfoundlers themselves must be God’s gift to travel writers. In John Gimlette’s frothy treatment, the island is absolutely teeming with impossibly colorful characters spouting nonstop entertainment . . . Gimlette is laugh-out-loud funny.” –The New York Times Book Review

“John Gimlette is attracted to bizarre places and writes about them with often withering irony [and] surrealist panache. . . . An absurd and entertaining book.” –National Geographic

“Oddly compelling. . . . The reward is the feast of stories gathered from taverns and ferry rides and old journals: drownings, battles with ‘Esquimaux’ greenhorns challenging an unforgiving wilderness, folks who still use dogsleds because in tough times, ‘You can't eat a snowmobile.’” –The Washington Post

“Terrific stuff. . . . A dazzlingly multifaceted portrait of the region. . . . A hugely entertaining book in which the interest never flags. . . . As a descriptive writer, a master of the telling observation and the well-chosen epithet, [Gimlette] is in the highest class.” –The Daily Telegraph

From the Publisher

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 cabinbound with two dimwitted drunks (''babies with red whiskers, perhaps, or experiments thrown up by the sea''), of appalling weather, dogs so hungry they'll devour hymnbooks, 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.''
— Thhe New York Times

Elizabeth Royte

Witty author Gimlette here does for Newfoundland what he did for Paraguay in At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. He approaches his topics with a combination of respect and good-natured ribbing, shedding light on a previously obscure land. But while Paraguay and Newfoundland both have historical commonalties-colonialism, dictators, and dirty laundry, to name three-Gimlette's study of Newfoundland is personal. He masterfully weaves the modern history of Newfoundland and Labrador with that of his great-grandfather Eliot Curwen, a physician on a mission in 1893. Gimlette traces Dr. Curwen's travels though these two outposts of the British empire-with help from Curwen's well-kept journal-seeking out the descendants of those Curwen encountered. As with Paraguay, the light Gimlette shines here reveals both paradise and perdition. We find aboriginal peoples nearly destroyed by disease and addictions. There are murderers, philanderers, cads galore, and, of course, the ever-present moose. But there's also the rugged beauty of Newfoundland and the richness of its natural resources (like the once ubiquitous codfish-a source of both boom and bust.) Another delightful and well-researched book by an entertaining travel writer, this is recommended for all libraries.-Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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