GAFF TOPSAILS

By Patrick Kavanagh

Viking

447 pages, $24.95

Only a cerebral Gumby would remain unsculpted by the mental body-building required to translate James Joyce's Ulysses into Mandarin Chinese. In spite of extensive time spent in Beijing doing just that, Patrick Kavanagh's latest project, his first novel, is not so stylistically influenced as one might think. Rather than plunging into boggy streams of consciousness, Kavanagh emulates Joyce's focus on style more than his actual stylistic techniques, resulting in an ornately wrought work with a commanding sense of place and experience.

Gaff Topsails takes places on a single midsummer's day in 1947, when some fishermen smell a new iceberg, "musty yet at the same time pure, like the air in a vault that has gone undisturbed for centuries." Stranded just offshore an Irish Catholic settlement in Newfoundland, the fishermen imagine the berg as a schooner, a basilica, an image of the Virgin Mary, Star of the Sea. As the rest or the town awakens, the drunken lighthouse keeper believe it to be a ship come to rescue him from his delusional exile. A teenage girl believes it as an omen of a new beau. The new parish priest sees it as the Isle of Skellig Michael, drifted from his native Ireland to remind him of his lost love and his current isolation.

Though the iceberg itself does not move, it sublimes in the multiplicity of the villager's interpretations, hardly solid as it is pushed into each individual's hopes and terrors. Though the place and time in which the novel occurs is limited to a single day in a very small village, what seems stagnant and solid as permafrost liquefies and then reforms as it is seen from each character's perspective. Just like the zone between the land and the sea that is never dry for the lapping waves, what seems neatly defined land and water mixes, leaving enough room for interpretation to fill the novel's 450 pages. An iceberg is both shelter from a storm and a ripping force of destruction, Newfoundland waste and an Eden, the sea a blessing and curse.

Where the strength of Kavanagh's style is most evident in its ability to grapplewith this ambiguity--to name duplicity withsharp-shooter accuracy that gives weight to eachside and validity to contradiction. Refined by avocabulary that sends the reader scurrying for thedictionary both in attempt to reacquaint herselfwith nautical anatomy and with words of ratherstartling specificity, Gaff Topsails is notalways an easy book to read. Although Kavanagh'sintimate knowledge makes for description asaccurate and illuminating as his vocabulary,imbuing this description with creative imaginationdemands a heavy toll in effort. There is a chapterdevoted exclusively to the geological history ofthe Newfoundland coast, pages replicating thedialectical banter of bored men on the open sea,and every other paragraph brings the unmistakablescent of the sea; electric, heavy, changing withthe hours and the wind.

If the description at first seems extraneous,trying the patience, it is soon apparent that ifKavanagh resembles Joyce in the priority of style,his own style itself is most reminiscent of19th-century writers like Melville and Hawthorne.Kavanagh's description of the land not onlyinjects the reader with a detailed feel for theNorth Atlantic, it also operates on a moresymbolic basis as a signifier of meaning.Extrapolating in a literary sense the Celticsuperstition of his outbound parish, the mostbanal aspects of the material world take on aspiritual meaning in this work.

Although Kavanagh's ability to portray the samesubject from many perspectives is practicedthroughout the book, as each characters react tothe weather, the turn of the sea and the creakingiceberg in a different way, his skill is mosthoned in his discussion of the novel's mostpervasive subject; the Roman Catholic Church.

The portrayal of the church is possibly themost interesting contradiction of the novel. Onone hand, the novel is deeply involved with theIrish Catholic tradition. His characters pray whenwake up, before they eat and when frightened. Theparish is the center of the village, educating thechildren, caring for the sick and ringing thebells that determine meals, sleep and work. At thesame time as the life of the village is steeped inthis tradition, though, there is the suggestionthat this religion is deadening, hypocritical andpossibly evil.

This insinuation is particularly strong in thelegend of the community's founding, which takes upa significant chunk of the novel's middle. Thefounder is the illegitimate son of an Irish monk,who raises the boy cloistered and influencedexclusively by the priestly life and thescriptures. When his father dies and the othermonks flee a famine, the boy is loosed upon thecountry. Having never encountered humans before,he viciously survives the hunger by murdering andcannibalizing those whom he has been taught inLatin to treat as Christ. He continues in similarfashion in Newfoundland, as a pirate terrorizingthe British Colony there until the day theCatholics return and he falls back into theautomatic regimen of his youth.

Gaff Topsails offers few clear judgmentsabout the contradictions that fill its pages andwhich of the many perspectives is correct. It doesnot define the iceberg as a symbol of salvation ordamnation, but rather shows it as both, acathedral of blue ice and a treacherous perilwhose exact scope cannot be fathomed. If only forits descriptive power, the book is a deeplymesmerizing celebration of ambiguity and of theundeniable good in every conception