Scan barcode
A review by weaselweader
Island: The Complete Stories by Alistair MacLeod
4.0
“You can cut the ties that bind but not without losing a part of yourself.”
The words that apply to Alistair MacLeod’s writing come easily to mind – lyrical, smooth, warm, mellifluous, evocative, provocative, clear, poetic, crisp … well, I think you get the idea. The man certainly has a way with words and one can easily imagine a group of rapt listeners gathered around a fireplace of an evening listening to MacLeod weave his tales of the culture of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island and the people who live there, those who have left the island or perhaps those have returned to the island – sometimes to visit, sometimes to stay and sometimes, like a migrating salmon, perhaps to die.
On two men enjoying a glass of heated rum and sugar and a pipe full of fresh tobacco, for example:
“We do not say anything for some time, sitting upon the chairs, while the sweetened, heated richness moves warmly through and from our stomachs and spreads upwards to our brains. Outside the wind begins to blow, moaning and faintly rattling the window’s whitened shutters.”
Life in Cape Breton is a world apart from life in the more modern world of, for example, 21st century Canada in metropolitan southern Ontario. But if life is different, then death is light worlds apart:
“Three of her brothers, as young men, perished in the accidental ways that grew out of their lives – lives that were as intensely physical as the deaths that marked their end. One as a young man in the summer sun when the brown-dappled horses bolted and he fell into the teeth of a mowing machine. A second in a storm at sea when the vessel sank while plying its way across the straits to Newfoundland. A third frozen upon the lunar ice fields of early March when the sealing ship became separated from its men in a sudden obliterating blizzard.”
“How lonely now and distant those lives and deaths of my grandmother’s early life. And how different from the lives and deaths of the three sons she has outlived. Men who left the crying gulls and hanging cliffs of Rankin’s Point to take the road into the larger world to fashion careers and lives that would never have been theirs on this tiny sea-washed farm. Careers that were as modern and as affluent as the deaths that marked their termination. Real estate brokers and vice-presidents of grocery chains and buyers for haberdashery firms seldom die in the daily routines of the working lives that they have chosen. The pencil and the telephone replace the broken, dangling reins and the marlinspike and the sealing club; and the adjusted thermostats and the methodic Muzak produce a regulated urban order far removed from the uncertainty of the elements and the unpredictability of suddenly frightened animals.”
If a potential reader from the USA is looking for a point of comparison, think perhaps of Garrison Keillor’s LAKE WOBEGON DAYS or John William Tuohy’s SHORT STORIES FROM A SMALL TOWN. Canadian readers, on the other hand, might be reminded of their enjoyment of Stuart McLean's STORIES FROM THE VINYL CAFÉ.
The stories are, each and every one, first rate and enjoyable. When they’re assembled into an anthology like this, I have to say that the pace is such that the entire collection suffers and it certainly can’t be characterized as compelling. And that is the reason why I’ve withheld that final star on the review. But for those that are looking for bona fide small town Canadiana, you’ve certainly got the right book in your hands.
Paul Weiss
The words that apply to Alistair MacLeod’s writing come easily to mind – lyrical, smooth, warm, mellifluous, evocative, provocative, clear, poetic, crisp … well, I think you get the idea. The man certainly has a way with words and one can easily imagine a group of rapt listeners gathered around a fireplace of an evening listening to MacLeod weave his tales of the culture of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island and the people who live there, those who have left the island or perhaps those have returned to the island – sometimes to visit, sometimes to stay and sometimes, like a migrating salmon, perhaps to die.
On two men enjoying a glass of heated rum and sugar and a pipe full of fresh tobacco, for example:
“We do not say anything for some time, sitting upon the chairs, while the sweetened, heated richness moves warmly through and from our stomachs and spreads upwards to our brains. Outside the wind begins to blow, moaning and faintly rattling the window’s whitened shutters.”
Life in Cape Breton is a world apart from life in the more modern world of, for example, 21st century Canada in metropolitan southern Ontario. But if life is different, then death is light worlds apart:
“Three of her brothers, as young men, perished in the accidental ways that grew out of their lives – lives that were as intensely physical as the deaths that marked their end. One as a young man in the summer sun when the brown-dappled horses bolted and he fell into the teeth of a mowing machine. A second in a storm at sea when the vessel sank while plying its way across the straits to Newfoundland. A third frozen upon the lunar ice fields of early March when the sealing ship became separated from its men in a sudden obliterating blizzard.”
“How lonely now and distant those lives and deaths of my grandmother’s early life. And how different from the lives and deaths of the three sons she has outlived. Men who left the crying gulls and hanging cliffs of Rankin’s Point to take the road into the larger world to fashion careers and lives that would never have been theirs on this tiny sea-washed farm. Careers that were as modern and as affluent as the deaths that marked their termination. Real estate brokers and vice-presidents of grocery chains and buyers for haberdashery firms seldom die in the daily routines of the working lives that they have chosen. The pencil and the telephone replace the broken, dangling reins and the marlinspike and the sealing club; and the adjusted thermostats and the methodic Muzak produce a regulated urban order far removed from the uncertainty of the elements and the unpredictability of suddenly frightened animals.”
If a potential reader from the USA is looking for a point of comparison, think perhaps of Garrison Keillor’s LAKE WOBEGON DAYS or John William Tuohy’s SHORT STORIES FROM A SMALL TOWN. Canadian readers, on the other hand, might be reminded of their enjoyment of Stuart McLean's STORIES FROM THE VINYL CAFÉ.
The stories are, each and every one, first rate and enjoyable. When they’re assembled into an anthology like this, I have to say that the pace is such that the entire collection suffers and it certainly can’t be characterized as compelling. And that is the reason why I’ve withheld that final star on the review. But for those that are looking for bona fide small town Canadiana, you’ve certainly got the right book in your hands.
Paul Weiss