Gaff Topsails [Hardcover]

A 500-year-old Irish Catholic village on the Newfoundland coast comes to life in this assured debut, set in the years after WWII. Michael Barron, a young mute, is awakening to adulthood as he explores an enormous iceberg with his friends, still half in thrall to his father's stories of a beautiful woman who rides the ice, part Blessed Virgin Mary, part Coleridgean ghost. Although Michael is the novel's only mute, his silent isolation is common to nearly all Kavanagh's characters: Johnny the Light, an old, crippled hero, is a haunted, often delirious drunk; Father MacMurrough, new to the parish, has spent most of his adulthood in Asia avoiding village life and its unhappy associations; restless, teenage Mary loathes her mother and pursues a future husband through secret pagan rituals. This is nothing new. The village's founding father, Tomas Croft, was even more isolated, the son of an Irish monk who stole away from his English companions to land in Newfoundland in solitude. Shifting its focus from character to character, Kavanagh's sometimes ponderous narrative treats each individual story as a complete piece for the reader to assemble with the others. The abundance of period detail and unmistakable shadow of Joyce (whom Kavanagh claims to have helped translate into Mandarin) cast an occasional pall, but there is no mistaking the talent and vivid imagination at work throughout the novel.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Although perhaps a bit overwrought in places, this first novel has much to recommend it. Atmospheric, full of memorable characters and salty vernacular, and for the most part skillfully written, it tells the story of a single day in a small Irish Catholic fishing village on the coast of Newfoundland. The day is June 24, 1948?the Feast of St. John the Baptist. This day also marks the end of school and the summer solstice, and Michael, Gus, and "Wish," the three young men at the center of this story, spend much of it fishing, talking about women, and looking for trouble on a huge iceberg offshore. The cast of supporting characters is also vividly realized, particularly Father MacMurrough, the introspective and lonely parish priest; and Mary, an adolescent intrigued by what ancient Midsummer's Day superstitions might be able to tell her about her future husband. Recommended for libraries with large modern fiction collections.?Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community-Technical Coll., Canterbury, CT
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.