I'm going to Newfoundland tomorrow, a trip I've been long planning, both literally and in the corner of my mind where you think about the trips you'd one day like to take. I've been holding on to Alistair MacLeod's collection Island for years, thinking that when I actually made it, I'd take it with me, only to pull it down to show a friend and for her to point out that the stories in it are about Cape Breton Island, the northern part of Nova Scotia, not Newfoundland. Oh, well. But Newfoundland is only a ferry's ride away from Cape Breton--or a fishing boat's hop, as many of the stories in the collection make clear--so let's think of it as a way of launching off.
These stories, which were written from 1968 to 1999, are almost all about the small Gaelic communities that dot the shore of Cape Breton Island. They're communities where Gaelic is still spoken, at least by older generations, and MacLeod's prose seems to borrow something of the language's oral traditions, or at the very least, it has a slightly antiquated voice that seems in keeping with the disappearing language. Comparing it to Acadian French and the language of the Mi'kmaq First Nations, MacLeod describes all of them "trapped in the beautiful prisons of the language they loved." In the last story, "Clearances," a young man travels to the Scottish communities of his ancestors, where the language, and the way of life that accompanied it, have nearly died. He is Canadian because the traditional sheepherding life died out and sent its would-be inheritors to Canada (and Australia, and elsewhere), and such tragedy repeats itself later in the man's life when, as an old man, he confronts the pressure to sell of his land in the face of mounting clear-cutting and tourism interest in the Cape Breton shore.
Many of these stories, in fact, recount the troubled relationship that Cape Bretoners have with the interest of tourists and folklorists: In "The Boat," the narrator recalls the way his traditional mother was shamed by his father's eagerness to sing old Gaelic songs for tourists. In "The Tuning of Perfection," the CBC comes around wanting to record the Gaelic songs of man whose sung them all his life, but their demands--to cut them short, to sing them fast--rankle, because they are laments, stories that must be told in full. Almost all the characters in MacLeod's stories find themselves, even at what feels like the most remote edge of the earth, on the precipice of change, like the lighthouse keeper of the title story who is ultimately replaced by an automated light.
These characters are lighthouse keepers, fishermen, farmers, coal miners. They work with their bodies and have deep knowledge about animals. A lot of the best stories, actually, are about relationships with animals: the big gray dog, for example, who gets pregnant and disappears, only to return and accidentally provoke her many grown puppies to kill her owner when he embraces her. For many decades afterward--in a narrative that borrows naturally from the Gaelic oral tradition--the members of that family believe that sighting a "big gray dog" is an omen of impending death. Or, more lightheartedly, the story "Second Spring," about a young boy with dreams of breeding his prized cow to a prized bull, only to have her waylaid on the journey by a horny halfbreed he can't stop. You really get the sense from these stories that MacLeod knows what he's talking about when it comes to the lifeways of Cape Bretoners; the stories aren't just immaculately researched, but really lived. He convinces with stories like the one of the cow who swallowed a broken beer bottle, which was found in her stomach "completely surrounded by a strange almost translucent knob of gristle," which "seemed to glow like a huge, obscene pearl."
As they live close to the land--and sometimes under it, in the case of the coal miners--they live close to death, also. MacLeod writes about death with clear-eyed honesty and sincerity, unclouded by irony or black humor. A story like "The Road to Rankin's Point," in which the young narrator confesses to his dying grandmother that he's been given months to live, might seem mawkish or sentimental, but MacLeod manages to strike exactly the right tone. His stories often stretch over long periods of time, kind of like Alice Munro's, but he's more interested in seeing his characters at the very end of their lives. Death and loss here are always not just privately tragic but generationally so, they mean the slow death of languages and communities and traditions, even as death becomes part of the landscape as it does in "The Road to Rankin's Point":
The sharp, right-angled turn and its ascending steepness has always been called by us "The Little Turn of Sadness" because it is here that my grandfather died so many years ago on a February night when he somehow fell as he walked or staggered toward his home which was a steep two miles away. He had already covered the six miles from the village when he lost his footing on the ice-covered rock, falling backwards and shattering the rum bottle he carried within his safe back pocket. Now I feel my own blood, diseased and dying, I think of his, the brightest scarlet, staining the moon-white snow while the joyous rabbits leaped and pirouetted beneath the pale, clear moon.
The question, only hinted at here, is: If grandma, living at the top of the hill, will be gone soon, and the young narrator is dying before his time, how long will there be someone left to call the "sharp, right-angled turn" the "Little Turn of Sadness," and thereby remember the man who died there? MacLeod is interested in that kind of loss, but the stories themselves never seem melodramatic or distraught. In truth, they're more pastoral than elegiac, interested in the way that people live with the seasons, the bright summers and difficult winters, and the way that such lives breed both joy and tragedies.
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