Krishna
The offbeat movie a few years ago based on this book and with the same name made waves in the alternate circuit. I did not see the movie but was curious and so was happy to get a chance to read the book.
The story happens in the maritime province of Newfoundland, reminiscent of Maine in the US. The story also has a very unusual protagonist. He is Quoyle, and is very conscious of his (in his mind) ugly face and the large jaw. Diffident, always trying to place a hand to hide his hideous jaw, he fails in everything in US. He was a newspaper man but could not do news for nuts. Then tries his hand in driving a taxi, working as a waiter etc. Then he decides to Newfoundland. Tries his hand in a nondescript paper in a small Canadian town.
A few surprises are hidden there. This book was written in 1993 and talks about news of failed banks. In Canada? In 1993? Wasn’t that the glorious eighties when recession was supposed to have been “banished forever” by financial innovation?
He makes friends with Patrick and Marcelia, a black couple but they go away.
We learn slowly of his past life. We learn that he married disastrously, Petal Flower, a wild thing is married to him but never faithful. She openly insults him and then goes away, leaving two kids (you wonder if they are even his) for him to look after. She goes off after men, for months disappearing from the house. She comes when she likes, and asks him to leave her; he is stupidly loyal, hurting when she has the audacity to bring the latest flavour of the month home to have sex in the next room to his, when he is watching TV! You feel such a wave of sympathy for him and share in the feeling of helplessness.
She takes the kids he adores and apparently sells them for money and dies in a car crash on the way back. The kids, Sunshine and Bunny were rescued just before they were to be implicated in a child porn scene. It is really heartrending.
This is all before he moved back to Newfoundland with his kids, and joins his spinster aunt, who takes them in.
Quoyle joins as a shipping news reported and bumbles along with his aunt and the kids. He buys a useless boat for too much money.
Poetic storytelling style draws you in. Interesting small port city stories, especially of the hunt for the newspaper editor to find a job in the face of repeated job losses and recessions. Quayle writes about a piece on Hitler’s boat (sold to another owner who visits Newfoundland) without consulting the editor, and that becomes a success.
Lovely description of the coastal life and lovely English combine to give you the experience of watching maritime small city life from a front row seat. Well written. If you like the novels of Roddy Doyle who tells life like it is in rural Ireland, this would appeal to you.
The story has incidents, not all rural life. A head pops up in a trunk and turns out to be that of the husband – one of the couple who owned the Hitler’s boat.
The body is found later.
The prose and the intimate descriptions of life I a small town in Newfoundland are the two main features that raise the level of the book to an interesting high.
Examples of descriptions that make you pause and think: “Ice as colourless as a Sardiron’s plate… Sea like a silk cloth draped over a bunch of mice” Small sharp sentences.
Quayle almost drowns and is rescued. Then finds romance with Wavey.
Jack’s episode (not described in detail to avoid spoilers) provides the shocking twist and the final impetus to settle down for Quoyle.
I just loved reading this book – a very good story set in very believable backdrop of small seaside town in Newfoundland.
I will give it a 8/10
- – Krishna