Harvey creates vivid images, and his characters speak in the local dialect in a natural flow that does not demean them, and avoids annoying the reader. Yet, one cannot totally exonerate him from having stooped to a tone of condescension in the creation of some of his characters. As one reads this novel, one wonders whether Newfoundlanders from the outlying villages are really such simple folk as he describes them, or if he makes them out to be so to suit his tale.

The book has a host of characters, almost too many. Theirs is the village of Bareneed, whose inhabitants used to make their living from cod fishing. The closure of the fishery changes the life of the locals and creates an understandable, deep discontent among many former fishers. During the summer townies move into empty houses, one of whom is Joseph Blackwood, a fishery's officer. Although born in Bareneed, he left with his family while still an infant, and now has returned for a vacation with Robin, his seven-year-old daughter. This time together is supposed to be a renewal of the relationship between father and daughter, and to give Blackwood a chance to reflect on the break-up of his marriage.

Shortly after their arrival people contract a strange illness that first makes them very irritable, then violent, and finally prevents them from breathing. As more and more patients end up in the hospital in the nearby town of Port de Grave, doctors are unable to find any physical cause for the illness, and the death of some of these patients.

The illness, however, is not the only strange event happening. Fish resembling sea monsters depicted in local lore suddenly appear in the sea and on the beaches of Bareneed; the military moves in and closes the village off from the outside world, and conducts strange technological manoeuvrers on the hills overlooking the village and the ocean. Bodies are washed ashore, some of them in clothing of previous centuries. They are in remarkable condition, without the usual signs of drowning. The media pick up on the story and make Bareneed a nightly event on television.

Robin, like local eccentrics Eileen Laracy and Tommy Quilty, has the ability to see the spirit world. This makes it possible for her to see a little girl, who vanished with her father. They presumably drowned. The girls become eerie playmates.

Claudia, the drowned girl's mother, lives in a solar energy house next to where the Blackwoods have moved in for the summer. She is a strangely ethereal creature, haunted by the vanishing of child and husband. She expresses her grief through denying herself life-giving water and sustenance. This anorexic woman, who wears flowing gowns that cover an extended belly so typical of famine victims, holds a strong attraction over Joseph with sinister implications for him. He appears to be having a nervous breakdown that he is trying to control with a lot of pill popping, but that cannot prevent him from having strangely violent thoughts.

To bring his story alive Harvey set his story in 1999, judging by his reference to a real event in Newfoundland history. In 1929 the town of Burin was destroyed by a tsunami, and locals reported the sighting of strange sea creatures prior to the event. The author has created a modern story in which reality and fantasy are deeply blurred. Often he does so with great skill, but at other times credulity is somewhat stretched. When an author like Umberto Eco gives us a character like Baudolino, who speaks of seeing unusual creatures in far-away, unknown places, we know that the fabulist part of the story is being told by a self-confessed liar. Harvey gives us no such escape.

There are also some credibility gaps in the story, and untied strings. To mention two: How did the military become involved so suddenly, and from where and how did Lt. Commander French obtain the orders, and the equipment for his experiments? Was the vanishing of Claudia's husband an accident or murder-suicide? Readers can draw their own conclusion, but this guessing game does not enhance the novel.

It seems the reader is asked to totally disband all disbelief for the sake of the story's unfolding. One does so for most of the time because the story has a strong momentum, but occasionally, one wishes that Harvey hadn't gone quite so close to the edge. There is something naive in the concept of the novel that makes modern inventions the cause of natural disasters.

As with all fables, there is a moral to this story. It paints technology as the bad guy in the lives of good people, whose livelihood and way of life is being destroyed by the lack of fish in the sea. Harvey appears to equate the loss of a way of life with the loss of history and culture of a people. History is not that easily lost, and through technology is preserved far more often than lost. The history of Newfoundland will forever be preserved; its culture will change because true culture, surely, can only exist in an ever-changing environment. Storytelling, a strong component of the cultural tradition of that island, will not die, it will simply take on another form, Harvey being one of the components of it.

Perhaps it would have made more sense to create a tale that exposes human greed as the culprit that brought about the loss of the fishery, and human unwillingness to be satisfied with enough instead of wanting ever more. The moralizing in the tale is, however, subtle enough to overcome, even if the rationale implies an almost sentimental attachment to the past. Only at the very end, in the epilogue set sometime in the future, does the author go overboard. He promotes the return to the old ways in which people do away with not only technology, but also electricity. This abandoning of modernity he hails as the savior of Bareneed. Surely, he cannot believe that the old days were the good days when we know only too well that they were also the cruel days. You can't go into the future by going back to the past.

[The Town that Forgot how to Breathe, Kenneth J. Harvey, Raincoast Books, 471 pages, $24.95]

Sea of Heartbreak is a book that really does break one's heart. It records humankind's unfathomable greed and cruelty. It tells of our blindness to reality, our unwillingness to change. It is an account of why and how we have depleted the oceans of fish, and diminished other wildlife.

Michael J. Dwyer, the book's author, was once a Newfoundland fisherman and sealer. He is now a trucker and has turned to writing because he wants to tell us what price we are paying for putting fish on our table. It is a very high price that takes not only the fish into account, but the "waste" consisting of fish that is thrown back into the sea because these fish do not meet the requirements of a particular catch or of a particular buyer, the accidental killings of whales and other mammals in abandoned gill nets, and the wanton killing of sea birds, seals, otters, and bears by the fishing crews. He reveals how a supposedly romantic, honest way of life dehumanizes men until they can no longer tell right from wrong, fun from out and out cruelty.

This may all sound very alarmist, but Dwyer makes a very strong case through the depiction of his last journey out on the ocean to catch turbot. What he witnessed on that last fishing expedition made him foreswear a lifelong, generation-long way of life. It also made him an outsider on an island where fishing has been practised for hundreds of years.

Dwyer's story begins on August 25, 1998 with a telephone call that offered a fishing job at a time when he had few options left to him to make a living. He knew he had to make a choice between leaving his family in Newfoundland and become a trucker on the mainland, or sell his house and move his family to Calgary fully aware that the money from the sale would be insufficient to buy a property in the new location. He did not really want to leave, but he writes, "I had degenerated over the course of the last fourteen years from being a productive member of a happy household to being a mostly unhappy, near income-less, middle-aged dependent whose wife kept the wolves at bay."

The phone call offered him a job on a 65-foot fishing vessel, the MV Styx, which in his mind offered a foothold for the future. The ship planned to leave the next day for Ungava Bay to fish for turbot. His pay was to be six per cent of the take from the catch. A second ship, the 60-foot MV Vantage, belonging to the same owners, would also be coming along on the about eight-week-long trip. It would take them through the Labrador coast's Iceberg Alley, then through the Hudson Strait to the Ungava Bay fishing grounds.

The ship left Lewisporte, Dwyer's hometown, on August 26 and he immediately saw that the skipper and crew of the Styx had little regard for the environment. The ship's garbage was thrown into the ocean with impunity. He was shocked to discover that the crew used sea birds for target practice. When he voices his concern to a crew member, Hector, he was told: "I understand how you feel, but let me tell you something. The squeaky wheel don't get the grease onboard this one. It gets replaced, and if you got anything to say about what you see or what goes on at sea aboard this ship, I'd advice you to say nothing until you're back on dry land." On the second day out Dwyer had already made up his mind that once back home, he would "squeak", and the book is the result.

The two vessels had plans to fish for No. 1 turbot. This meant that any turbot not fit for this description would be thrown overboard. Their catches were brought to the Bakur, a collector ship moored at Port Burwell, where the fish were packed and flash frozen. As it turned out much of what the skipper of the Styx considered No. 1 turbot was rejected by Kim, a Japanese inspector. The catch was for the Japanese market. When the skipper protested, holding up a 35-pound specimen, the Japanese ". . . casually inspected the great fish. He pointed at the white marks on the belly. 'Scrubbed,' he said simply.

"'Scrubbed!' Ben blared in mock echo. 'Scrubbed!' he repeated, holding up the great fish. 'There's not one thing in God's world wrong with that turbot.'

"'Scrubbed. Number two,' replied Kim, sticking to his guns. 'We pay only for number one.'"

After two weeks out at sea, they had been credited with only 2,500 pounds of fish. A meagre amount because to earn a reasonable payout for the seven crew members, they would have had to sell 80,000 pounds of turbot by the time they returned home.

The remainder of the catch was thrown overboard as waste. It shared the same fate as unsuspecting chimaeras and other creatures caught in the ship's huge gill nets made out of monofilament. "The manta rays went out the same way. All too often, I'd suspend one by the tail out of the portal and drop it among the noddies, hoping that it might swim away," Dwyer writes. "No way. Time and time and time again the tide flipped them over to show white bellies as they slowly sank into the black. Hour after hour after hour was enough to break the hardest heart."

The Styx crew managed to take in a few more catches to the Bakur, but there was little gain for the men. On the return voyage, Dwyer watched more of the ship's garbage being thrown overboard. He saw 24 monofilament webbings and a deep freeze pushed over the rail, well clear of the ship's hull.

The Styx arrived at La Scie harbour around midnight on October 14. Another three-and-a-half hours later Dwyer was home. "It was finally over. I had endured," he writes. He was glad to be home despite the knowledge that his earnings from the trip were almost zero and that he still had to pay a $170 bill for some equipment he had bought to go on this fishing expedition.

Dwyer is fairly evenhanded in his recounting of the sea journey. We listen in on conversations with members of the Bakur (Norwegian meaning shark), who share his concern about the waste that commercial fishing produces. The crew of this ship is horrified by the practice of the Styx crew to shoot at anything that moves. Dwyer also learns that the Bakur skipper does not allow guns on board. Not all fishers are dehumanized by the struggle on the sea. Dwyer makes no attempt to politicize his story. It is left to those, who understand the predatory fishing practices of the Japanese and other Far Eastern countries, to interpret the meaning of the fact that off the Labrador coast the Japanese control the fish catches. Where, one asks, is the Canadian government, where are the fishery's regulators who must surely know that gill netting is destroying the very existence of life in the ocean.