Michael Crummey's latest novel, 'Galore,' interweaves the fantastical with the banal, blurring the lines between the two.

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Kate Wallace

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When he started the novel that would become Galore, Michael Crummey knew he wanted to write a fat book.

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Really fat.

"I wanted all of Newfoundland to happen in this one little fictional outport, which is kind of a ridiculous ambition," he said recently from Galiano Island, B.C., where he was visiting in-laws.

He laughed.

"But I did want to get as much of the place in as possible."

As titles go, Galore is apt. The epic tale is near to bursting with characters, dialogue, narratives, mystery and history.

Set in the coastal communities of Paradise Deep and the Gut, it opens in the "mists of European settlement" in the early 1800s, tracing the entwined branches of two families - those of Devine's Widow and King-Me Sellers - through six generations, to the end of the First World War.

The ambitious novel is so full of talk and action and characters, you almost expect the covers to groan and bulge.

Crummey said writing the sprawling saga was "a bit like a two-year-long dream."

"It was a world that I could enter and spend time in," he said. "So the writing itself was often difficult, but the process of creating that world was a really pleasurable one."

It was a place he missed desperately when the novel was complete. Where he felt relief when he finished his previous two novels, River Thieves and The Wreckage, "when I finished this one I was completely at a loss. I was bereft almost, just knowing that I was never going to be back in that space again."

Making the shortlist for the Governor General's Award, to be announced Nov. 14, was a boost, for sure, but while the prestigious nomination helps with exposure, sales and reputation, "I feel like this book would have had a life regardless of whether it made the list."

Even before the nominees were announced, response to Galore had been strong, with Crummey enjoying the best reviews of his career, solid sales and enthusiastic reader response.

Critical and commercial hullaballoo aside, "I knew when I was writing this book that it was the best thing I'd ever written."

Despite Galore's broad scope and sprawling cast of characters, "there was no master plan," Crummey said.

He inched it ahead two or three pages a day, "just creating it as I went."

Before he began writing, he spent hours in the provincial archives, sifting through community histories and old reports, including that of a witch trial that took place in the 1700s.

The Buchans native wrote the book at home in St. John's, where he moved in 2001, after years in Ontario.

"I know for a fact that if I hadn't moved back to Newfoundland that I never would have written this book, that I couldn't have," he said.

The feel of the place and the old stories people would share fed his imagination.

Plus, he was submerged in the colourful language unique to Newfoundland, dotted with expressions such as "now the once," or words such as "dunch" (which is when your backside goes cold and numb from sitting on it for too long).

"I think living there made this book possible."

His job as novelist was to take all the disparate details and characters he'd collected and work them into a story.

"It was like a big jigsaw puzzle and I had it all laid out in front of me and I just had to take my time and start at the edges and then move in."

The novel is an amalgam of many types of narratives, from Bible stories and family lore to community gossip, political legends and folk tales.

"I was interested in the lore of the place and trying to create a sense of how those stories were created and also a sense of the place those stories grew out of," he said.

The book's opening scene is almost biblical, with a mute, white-haired man being delivered from the belly of a whale as "most of the shore's meagre population" looked on from the cold shingle.

"I was wanting to give a real sense of this world where people live between a really stark physical landscape and, on the other side, there was that kind of netherworld that was populated with ghosts and fairies and witches, and they didn't make any distinction between those two worlds. One was just as real as the other."

He adopts this attitude in his writing, interweaving the fantastical with the banal, blurring the lines between in the process.

"I wanted to give a sense that the story is what's real," he said. "The folklore is what's real in Newfoundland. I've always thought of the folklore of Newfoundland as the cultural DNA of the place. That's what tells us who we are as Newfoundlanders."

Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.

Editor's note: Michael Crummey reads from 'Galore' Friday, at 7 p.m., in the Ganong Hall Lecture Theatre as part of UNB Saint John's Lorenzo Reading Series.