It’s cold and cruel in Canada’s eastern margins

YOU know how much smaller the world has become when you look at the places our talented contemporary travel writers visit. Only 35 years ago you could wander with saffron-robed monks through exotic Luang Prabang in Laos and hear over the palace walls the crown prince practicing New Orleans jazz on his trumpet. If you were in the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok 60 years ago, a bearer brought hot water for your bath in earthenware jugs.

Now both places, like Machu Picchu in Peru and even the great Mt. Everest, are well visited and well described. Just about everyone has been or knows someone who’s been there, and everywhere else.

So Paul Theroux made a writing career of going to places like South America, India and China on dubious railway trains, and now John Gimlette, an attorney in London, has taken up oddities to write about, first, Paraguay in “At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig” and, now, in “Theatre of Fish,” Newfoundland and Labrador.

Both Canadian places, you may fairly conclude after reading Gimlette’s handsomely written accounts of them, are better read about than gone to.

Here Gimlette is in Portugal Cove South, Newfoundland:

“The wind tore at my coat like hunger. In my own life, the weather is almost incidental to my day -- water on the pavement, a cold draught, a cat curled up in the sun. These are details that can easily be missed. Not so here. To Newfoundlanders, the weather gives the day its personality, a system of emotions that has earned its own language: mauzy, civil, scuddy, dirty, duckish. The best weather for fishing is caplin weather [a caplin is a small fish of the smelt variety] and the rest ‘you can leave to the birds.’ Mostly, the weather has to be defied, like living with blindness or a crazy dog. No one knows this better than the people of Portugal Cove South. Unofficially, they endure more foggy days in a row than anywhere else in the world.”

That is on the south coast of Newfoundland, an island that has a few more than 500,000 people. Labrador, to the north, administratively part of its neighbor, is bleaker and lonelier: only 30,000 people on a piece of rock the size of Italy.

In both these cold chunks of Canada the visitor, like Gimlette, picks up what he can to write about. Gimlette has the good fortune, one may call it, of having had a great-grandfather, Eliot Curwen, who visited these places and kept a journal, which proves a handy reference point for Gimlette. There have been changes over time, but not many, and few profound.

Except one. The great fisheries, of cod, chiefly, that fed the Europeans from the first discoveries became so depleted that cod fishing was banned in the early 1990s. The ban was partially lifted in 1997, but the blow to the province remains, devastating, economically and in a social way too.

Gimlette shows what can happen in the way of bewilderment and frustration when the chief and just about the only reason for living at the edge of the warm and civilized world is taken away.

As Gimlette travels about these inhospitable landscapes he moves between past and present, the now living and the long gone. He presents a pretty comprehensive history of these now marginal lands and the tenacious souls who have peopled them for 500 years, hanging as if for dear life on barren rocks at the edge of a sea once filled with life-giving fish.

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Anthony Day, a former editor of The Times editorial pages, is a regular contributor to Book Review.