One of the central issues Kevin Major explores in New Under the Sun is a question poet John Newlove posed many years ago: "Whose land this is, and is to be." It's a question that concerns all of us: Newfoundlanders, aboriginal people and subsequent immigrants, including the recently arrived boatload of Tamil refugees.
In the case of Newfoundland, the primary claimants might seem to have been the Beothuks, now extinct because of disease, starvation and what amounts to genocide by European settlers. History has favoured the Europeans, with the Vikings representing the first, if short-lived, wave of invasion.
Major's fascinating exploration of this matter begins with the return of Shannon to the Rock. She's a Newfoundlander who went as far west as possible to escape her family history, but Vancouver's employment and romantic options sour and she accepts a job with Parks Canada to reassess the Viking site at L'Anse aux Meadows and the 7,500-year-old archaic burial site at L'Anse Amour in Labrador. The "return" is also a chance to rediscover her roots. Shannon will eventually meet and become involved with Simon, a teacher of mixed blood who wants the Viking sites reinterpreted to reflect the presence of and contact with the various indigenous peoples.
Before Shannon's awkward re-entry has progressed very far, a new narrative unfolds, that of Nonosa, leader of the Kanawashish tribe in Labrador, who first discovers the coast and its marine riches. Nonosa's good fortune, which he is willing to share with kindred tribes, angers his cousin and rival clan leader, Remesh. The story of Nonosa and his daughter lays the groundwork for an eventual migration of one of the tribes across the waters to Newfoundland.
The third narrative concerns vain, ambitious and pompous prig William Cormack, born in Newfoundland to a Scots family. Believing he is doing her, himself and history a favour, Cormack has Shawnadithit, the last surviving Beothuk, removed from the welcoming family home of the Peytons into his own care so he can extract information about her doomed tribe. In one moving scene, the lonely woman, who cannot fathom Cormack's motives in sequestering her, cries out to be comforted, only to be lectured and rebuffed
Shannon's story unfolds in a familiar laid-back contemporary idiom; Cormack's, in a deliberately stilted and formal 19th-century manner; and the indigenous Kanawashish story, in a language that is at once mythic and poetic.
Major cleverly presents Nonosa's story as excerpts from a novel Shannon is reading as part of her research, which gives him a certain freedom to play and let the language go over the top, as it does on several occasions. Do we blame Major or the "author" of the inner novel for lines such as these: "Spirit voices charged the air, life's canopy of birds cried ceaselessly. Nature's covering, spirit's word of consent." The prepositional phrase and abstract nouns have the perhaps intentional ring of bad historical writing, but don't contribute to what is otherwise a gripping, even poetic, narrative of survival.
More often, though, Major's verbal play is delightful, especially to a reader like me, who appreciates fine rhetoric and a good pun, as at the moment when Shannon finally learns that her mixed blood is "no longer a pigment of her imagination."
Love and sex are important threads. Among the Kanawashish, sex is natural and contractual, the exchange between Nonosa and his second wife, Biesta, mostly a trade-off for security and parenting. Cormack, who is not physically attracted to Shawnadithit, has the hots for his intellectual companion John MacGregor in Scotland, a case of undeclared and unrequited love.
As if to provide a counterpoint to the sexually repressed Cormack, and to incorporate yet another strand of Newfoundland history, Major includes a chapter that is ostensibly a "short story" about a married Basque whaler who falls in love and has a one-night stand with a beautiful native woman. To his surprise and shock, the tribe acknowledges this event with what is essentially a public marriage celebration. This chapter, which constitutes a fourth narrative thread, has a character named Shanawdí and has a gritty, cinematic quality that is engaging.
Shannon, whose sex with Simon is both "delicious" and matter-of-fact, had felt obliged to tell her girlfriends in Vancouver that she is heterosexual. As with Cormack's sexual ambivalence, there's an underlying uncertainty principle at work that is central to the novel. It's stated explicitly in the Basque story, where a simple event on the shoreline that is declared a miracle has the whalers at sixes and sevens, "unwilling to pledge themselves to either story."
As the sex, gender and origins of the teenager buried at the L'Anse Amour site are unknown or, at best, uncertain, so, too, are the sexual, cultural and racial relations in New Under the Sun. Whitman, Jung and contemporary DNA research suggests we are all related, all share the same DNA, the same male and female sexual characteristics.
Or, to give the final word to another poet, this time Tennyson: "I am a part of all that I have met."
Gary Geddes's most recent works are Falsework, The Terracotta Army and Swimming Ginger. He is working on a book about justice and healing in sub-Saharan Africa.