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In Blackstrap Hawco, Kenneth Harvey is attempting an Everyman for his home province, and at the same time mythologizing the endurance of its people. This novel stretches from Newfoundland's very beginning across the intervening generations to throw itself forward in time, as if poking a root into the foreseeable future. As such, it's a complete portrait of Newfoundland, as it has been and will be.

The first section, a panorama of characters from the beginning of the Hawco lineage, veers vertiginously across the years and the generations, encompassing every ancestor at every level of the family tree. If it's sometimes hard going, either due to the eccentricities of Harvey's style or the unrelenting parade of misery, it's often redeemed by mesmerizing scenes worthy of a national epic.

• Blackstrap Hawco: Said to be About a Newfoundland Family, by Kenneth J. Harvey, Random House Canada, 829 pages, $34.95

And if the scattered and half-remembered tales of lost uncles, alcoholism, abuse, incest, rape, madness and the seal hunt seem to be leading the reader nowhere, they are a faithful representation of the manner in which family history is passed to succeeding generations among people without privileged backgrounds. From mouth to ear, in scattered photographs and documents, by objects, homes and even clothes handed down the line. This is the substance that is Blackstrap's identity, and his burden.

The family tree hangs above the Hawcos like the canopy of a cliff-side tree, stunted and twisted, yet clinging by its roots to what little soil is in the rock. Blackstrap, the novel's main character, becomes the main root as the tree withers and dies above him. As he's burdened by his ancestors, so do they bind him to the ground: Early in his life, and sporadically thereafter, he visits the cleft in the hill where the mine collapsed on his brother, and squeezes himself into it as far as he can, unable to move even his head to the left or right. The first time he does this, we hear his thoughts: "This is where I belong."

That's a tip-off that Harvey is writing a "novel of the land," with the people rooted to it. By using a different textual surface for each character, one appropriately recognizable as the style of the era, Harvey moves among Romantic excess, Victorian reserve, naturalist description, stream of consciousness, modernism and contemporary pop-culture slang - the most difficult portion of the book to absorb, far more challenging than the phonetically rendered Newfoundland speech. (Fortunately, it comes late and is brief.) And though the characters do occasionally pass documents such as letters and journals to one another, they're inserted into the story, not presented to the reader instead of narrative. All this saves Harvey from having to set up the by-now-clichéd duality of most contemporary historical novels.

“ There is such a wealth of incident and detail in this novel that no survey can encompass it”

A broken leg begins this epic of pain and heartache, which limps along for generations under the grip of misery and misfortune on a biblical scale. When, after hundreds of pages, Blackstrap encounters an expatriate returning from the mainland, he "wonders how you can stay away." The wonder, of course, is how anyone can stand to stay, given what Harvey presents. By the time some humour shows up, nearly 500 pages in, it's too late, and seems out of place within the extended litany of misery. It's a joke about a broken wooden leg. Some time later, when Blackstrap surveys an audience of Newfoundlanders in a Halifax bar and comments on their "easy laughter," nothing has prepared us to accept this as part of Blackstrap's view of his neighbours.

Book Two finally focuses on Blackstrap himself. And the time and space taken by all the previous voices begin to pay off. By now, Blackstrap is more than a character in a situation, he's the embodiment of all who've come before. The past and his ancestors make Blackstrap's choices - his binges, failures and mistakes - seem inevitable, even logical: When he refuses the prison counselor's offer to teach him literacy, it's not from inbred ignorance. It is from the font of Hawco experience, and it's his declaration of autonomy. Blackstrap knows his land and his people more intimately than any PhD, and his disdain is for the imperialist ignorance of the outsiders, for the imposition of an alien ideology.

This is underlined in one of the book's rare moments of outright humour. When the railroads are shut down and the rails taken up, by men offered the "opportunity" of destroying their island's infrastructure, the ties are harvested as firewood by the people. The resulting pollution causes widespread sickness; the investigating government spends millions on outside researchers, working months to determine that the cause was ... the railroad ties. Jacob, Blackstrap's father, lets loose on the government bureaucrats, the scientists, the news reporters and all of those mainland "geniuses."

There is such a wealth of incident and detail in this novel that no survey can encompass it. Blackstrap becomes known to the world as a savage baby seal killer; he is the sole survivor of the sinking of the Ocean Ranger; he organizes his neighbours in an assault on foreign fishing trawlers (the single time in his life his father shows him approval).

Identifying people with the land, in literature, is a nationalist ideology, a myth-building function, such as Virgil performed for the Romans. And Harvey is explicitly making Blackstrap a mythic figure. But this status does not sit well on Blackstrap's shoulders: When recognized by a townie for whom he's doing some labour, he says, "Musta recognized me from da movies." Later, in prison, accompanied by ghosts, he's told by the phantom guard that he's "not properly dead" even though this clearly is his journey to Hell. He seems finally to have realized something, to have found something of value to cling to. But even here, he identifies it only in the negative: He will have no existence to speak of in his blank cell, "make no family" in prison. He's already got one, and he'll be loyal to it.

Still, Blackstrap is always fully human. When he spends some time working in Toronto, he takes no pleasure in the company of other Newfoundlanders, complaining that they drink too much. There's barely a scene in the book without an open beer, and Blackstrap has been sponging up rum and beer all along. Is this Blackstrap finally getting some kind of outside view of his own people? Is he finally no longer like them? After an old woman in Toronto tells him a fable of the men disappearing from the island, never to be seen again, he asks where they are. The answer? They're here. "You're one of them, aren't you?" It's enough to make him return.

He drowns his mind in alcohol and pointless action as often as he works. He purposefully takes the future mother of his children on a joyride they both know will end in a crash. He takes his father's fishing boat out at night, racing through a narrow passage, wrecking it. Driving a big rig for a sick friend across a dangerous stretch of road, he hits a moose, strikes another car and kills a young mother. Survival in Newfoundland seems both a miracle and all in a day's work. It's not the only fantastic element in the book, over the course of which Blackstrap loses fingers, toes and a testicle.

Despite his half-conscious bond with his place and people, Blackstrap is enraged when his girlfriend becomes pregnant. He feels trapped, his life a waste. In the hospital, when his first child is being born, his memories of recovery after the Ocean Ranger colour the experience: "He can't get the taste of death or disaster out of his mouth." Soon after, he can't think of a reason to step out of the path of a train. He thinks, "Stay away from the house whenever possible."

This is Harvey's big book after winning the Rogers Writer's Trust Award two years ago, for Inside. It's apparently the result of 15 years of work, and it shows. Harvey covers every period of Newfoundland history, illuminates everything individual and characteristic about it, encompasses its very being in these pages. Though more than 800 pages, it's a weightier tome than that. By virtue of its sheer size and scope, it's a deep source of impression, reflection and consideration. Its meticulous construction and control contain a breadth of incident and characterization seen only in the most ambitious and imposing novels.

At the same time, Harvey's careful portrayal of detail in Blackstrap's every move and all his senses brings the character's life overwhelmingly to light. His mastery of an almost limitless array of technique anchors this novel firmly in our time. He has succeeded in creating and portraying something unique, from the morbidly grotesque scenes of ship's passage by early settlers to the numbed and numbing consciousness of the sealers, from the relentless dangers of the sea to the insidious duplicity of federal programs, from alcoholism and abuse to ongoing poverty. For this reason, Harvey may be Newfoundland's Ahab more than its Melville.

Michel Basilières is the author of the novel Black Bird.