The frozen, unruly north

John Gimlette is a writer of vivid comical prose, whose first travel book appeared under the title At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. For his second, he has followed an ancestral trail, padding along in the footprints of his great-grandfather, Eliot Curwen. Curwen, a doctor, set off for Newfoundland and Labrador in 1893, ‘lands generally supposed to have been gnawed away by poverty and cold’. Gimlette finds a ‘theatre of fish’, where the locals speak a curious dialect, riddled with surviving elements from ‘Old English, Middle English, bad English, both classical and bog Irish, Portuguese, Micmac, Basque, Breton and babble’. Newfound- land, according to Gimlette, is a land neither entirely North American nor entirely European, a wild hinterland. Labrador he presents as a place where whole towns play bingo while storms rage outside.

Gimlette begins in Newfoundland’s main town, St John’s, thrice torched by the French, once by the Dutch and once by its own Royal Navy. It looks like ‘a fishing fleet anchored to a hill’. From here, Gimlette wanders from settlement to settlement, arrangements of shacks lashed by the Labrador Sea. His journey reaches a northerly nadir in a place called Nain, synonymous apparently with ‘pointless, motiveless slaughter’, in which seasonal depression turns to murder and suicide.

Along the way, Gimlette mingles ancestral history and humorous anecdote. It supplies a useful source of contrast: the dour figure of Gimlette’s great-grand- father wandering along the coast, administering check-ups and cures to the locals, with his descendant casting himself as a travelling Mr Bean, sliding down slopes and falling on his head into piles of mud. Gimlette has a knack for colourful phrases: he describes a local ferry as an ‘ark of exotic misfits’ floating along ‘Iceberg Alley’ and a ‘festival of the absurd’ at which ‘the Amazing A.