Gaff Topsails

Penguin, 1999. Very Good. In this ambitious first novel, author Patrick Kavanagh chronicles a single day--June 24, the Feast of Saint John the Baptist--in a remote village in r emote Newfoundland. June 24 is also Sweethearts Day, a day on which young w omen perform rituals as old as the hills to determine whom they will marry. These two celebrations, one Catholic, the other pagan, serve as the twin l odestones around which Gaff Topsails weaves its complex tale. On the one ha nd, there is Father MacMurrough, a restless priest who sees his new parish as a punishment and Kevin, an altar boy troubled by notions of God and sin; on the other there is Mary, a young woman in love with love and Michael Ba rron, a young mute who is starved for it. These characters live out their s ingle day between the twin shadows of two mountains (Gaff Topsails) and an iceberg offshore, their physical isolation a symbol of the spiritual solitu de in which they all exist. Comparisons to James Joyce's Ulysses are, perhaps, inevitable, with the arc hetypes Kavanagh presents (the fisherman's wife waiting, like Penelope, for her husband to return from the sea), the fragmented narrative, and the occ asional stream of consciousness. Like Ulysses, Gaff Topsails is not an easy book to read, but in the end, this novel rewards the patient reader with a crystalline portrait of a day in the life of a small community --This tex t refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly 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 awake.