![]() ![]() With The Innocents, Crummey spins out beautiful words to create a near-perfect novel. It communicates itself more as a feeling than as a knowing. But if your cloth is woven from a fine thread and if the shirts you sew from it are a perfect fit, well then … It’s hard for me to say what you have. Conversely, you can spin the finest thread and weave it into the most luxuriant fabric, but if the resulting clothes are ill-fitting, again, they are unwearable. You can make shirts of the finest cut, but if the fabric is woven from coarse thread, it will still be unwearable. ![]() By contrast, The Innocents is a good novel that has the benefit of polish. While Reproduction is a good novel, I found it ragged around the edges, like a first draft crying out for more attention. You know what they say: if you can’t say anything good … I note a single laconic entry in my personal journal: “No sparks.” Having finished Crummey’s book, I’m in a better position now to say that the wrong person won the prize. I never wrote anything here about Reproduction. ![]() Among other things, The Innocents, by Michael Crummey, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, losing out to Reproduction by Ian Williams. ![]()
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