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 . . .

*****

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 . . .