Alistair MacLeod
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999)
I first read No Great Mischief when the publisher sent it to me in galley form, and I knew even then that the novel would achieve great success. It is the most perfect meditation on the impact of the twentieth century on tribalism and tradition, and it is, in large part, a lament, an elegy, for a culture and a way of life that, if it has not already disappeared, is already in its death throes. When I go to a funeral, I do not expect to hear the unadorned truth about the dear departed. De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, we say, and I get what I expect, an idealized version of the deceased. The same, I think, is true of the novel. Perhaps the bonds within the clan, kwown in Gaelic, were not really as strong as the novel suggests; perhaps a MacDonald would not recognize another MacDonald quite as easily as he does in the novel, nor be quite as kind; but these are mere cavils. Within the confines of the book the logic works very well, and to criticize No Great Mischief on the grounds that it idealizes a dead or dying culture is as inappropriate as shouting during a funeral eulogy, “Who on earth are you speaking about?”
With that caveat in mind, let us approach the novel itself.
The first line is, “As I begin to tell this, it is the golden month of September in southwestern Ontario.” The man speaking is our protagonist, Alexander MacDonald. He is a married man with children, a successful orthodontist who lives in a world of teeth made perfect, “where the well-to-do sit with folded hands in attitudes of patient trust. Hoping that I might make them more beautiful than they were before.” (p. 62)
The time is the recent past, about 1990. Our orthodontist narrator has left Windsor to drive to Toronto. He avoids Highway 401, preferring the quieter routes through villages where dogs still run down to the road to chase after cars. There is something about country life that is pleasing to him, and, as he drives, he reflects on the itinerant fruit pickers on the farms near the highway, from the Caribbean or Mexico or Quebec and New Brunswick, picking for wages they will take with them when they leave. “This land is not their own,” he tells himself, and as he narrates the novel, a story told always in his own voice, he will return repeatedly to this theme of displacement. There will be many references to the itinerant fruit pickers of Southern Ontario, those foreign workers who are compelled by economic necessity to leave, at least temporarily, the place of their heart.
As I read, I began to wonder why this middle-aged orthodontist would feel such compassion, such empathy, for the dispossessed. I had no idea that orthodontists were such sensitive people. I was all the more surprised since Alexander MacDonald seemed to have urgent and pressing concerns of his own. He makes his semi-regular visits to Toronto, to a filthy rooming house on Queen Street West, so that he might bring comfort and companionship and alcohol to his oldest brother Calum, living the life of a drunken ex-convict on Skid Row.
Alexander also has a twin sister, Catherine, the wife of a wealthy mining engineer in Calgary, who lives in an upper-middle-class comfort much like Alexander’s own. The paragraph that describes Alexander’s remembered visit to his sister is a masterpiece of well-chosen detail:
In the luxury of her understated living room we held the heavy crystal glasses filled with the amber liquid or placed them carefully on the leather-embossed coasters. In the bathrooms, discreetly located in angled alcoves, the toilets made no sound when they were flushed. The rushing waters all were stilled. (pp. 93-94)
That final sentence, with its echoes of Biblical majesty to describe what must be the most unnecessary piece of modern, middle-class, self-indulgent extravagance, is gorgeous. Later in the novel, when we meet country out-houses and buckets in the bedrooms, we will remember the expensive and pointless silence of Catherine’s water closet. What is the purpose of a silent toilet if the human body itself is not silent?
However, there are more important questions. How is it, for example, that of five living siblings in the MacDonald family two have achieved such affluence while a third is sick, penniless, and alone? The answer is a part of the story that Alexander MacDonald promised to tell us in the first sentence of the novel. The story is made up of his memories and the memories that were told to him. However far back the story goes, it will always be told in the present tense, because it is the story of a people, a family, a clan for whom the past is so closely intertwined with the present that it is indistinguishable. The battles of centuries past could have been fought yesterday, and those who have died achieve immortality in the vivid stories of those who live. The oral tradition among the MacDonalds is very strong, and the past is always told in Gaelic. Phrases from battles fought long ago have become part of the everyday MacDonald conversation, and they have taken on mythic significance. Two in particular come to mind: “My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald” and “If only the ships had come from France.” There will be others.
To understand the story, the saga, that Alexander MacDonald will tell us, with all its references to a long-ago past fresh in the mind of every MacDonald in the novel, to understand the exile of the MacDonalds from their native Scotland, and to understand their deep love of Cape Breton, the place of their exile, we must go back a number of centuries. Scottish history is not only the background to the novel, it is a condition of it.
Let us begin just before the year 1300. Scotland, England’s neighbour to the north, had always been a fiercely independent country. Twelve hundred years earlier, even the Romans had been unable to conquer it and had to content themselves with building a wall across the north of England to keep the Scottish warriors out.
But by the end of the thirteenth century, the situation had changed. The Romans were long gone, and England was strong and greedy for its neighbours’ lands. Wales and much of Ireland had already been swallowed up, and Edward I of England turned covetous eyes upon Scotland. By 1290, Edward felt able to claim Scotland as a subject nation and put a puppet king on the Scottish throne. But Edward had never been able to subjugate the clans of the Scottish Highlands, and soon even his puppet turned against him.
After only a few years as a nominally subject state of England, Scotland declared itself free again, and in 1306, a new king, Robert the Bruce, was acclaimed by all the major Scottish clans.
In 1314 the English once more invaded Scotland, but were soundly thrashed by the Scots at the Battle of Bannockburn. It was at Bannockburn, where Scotland won back its independence, that Robert the Bruce turned to the leader of the largest Scottish clan, on whose support he relied absolutely, and said, “My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald.” It is an expression we hear over and over again in the novel as one MacDonald speaks to another, an expression of absolute trust of one MacDonald in another.
After the Battle of Bannockburn, Scotland is free, and we now move forward nearly three hundred years.
In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I dies without an heir. To avoid civil war, Parliament invites Elizabeth’s cousin, James VI of Scotland, to become at the same time James I of England. One king will rule over two independent kingdoms. For nearly a century England would be ruled by Scottish kings: James I, Charles I, Charles II, and James II. But by 1688 the Protestant English suspected, with good reason, that James II was a secret Catholic and planned to restore England to the embrace of Rome. Accordingly, the English Parliament, with the support of the country, forced King James into exile. He tried to resist and raised an army in Ireland, but was smashed by the forces of the Protestant Dutch William and Mary of Orange, who had been invited to replace James on the English throne. Mary was a cousin of the Stuarts, but, like William, her husband, was staunchly anti-Catholic and thus eminently acceptable to the English.
Naturally, the end of the reign of James II sat even worse with the Scots than it did with the Irish. They rose up continually against the English to restore James and his family to the throne. They won some battles, like Killiecrankie in 1689, but more often they lost.
In 1715 and again in 1745 there were major Scottish uprisings, the two Jacobite rebellions. Both failed. The second rebellion was led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, the grandson of the exiled James II, but he and the clans were defeated at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. He might have won if the French had sent him the support they had promised, and thus we have the lament, heard constantly throughout the novel, “If only the ships had come from France.”
From the Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689 to the Second Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46, it became obvious to the English crown that the only way to destroy Scottish nationalism once and for all was to destroy the clans of the Scottish Highlands.
The English had taken the first step in 1707 by uniting England and Scotland in one political entity, the United Kingdom.
The second step came after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s failed rebellion when the English government imposed a forty-year ban on the bagpipes, the kilt, and, above all, the wearing of tartan as an outward symbol of clan membership.
Third, and most important, the English Parliament accelerated a process that had already begun for economic reasons. It was a process that the English history books call the Enclosures and the Scots call the Clearances.
Landowners in the United Kingdom had become increasingly aware that they could make a much greater profit by producing wool than they ever could from the pitifully small rents their tenant farmers could afford to pay. Act after act was rushed through the English Parliament permitting both English and Scottish landowners to enclose vast areas of land for the grazing of sheep, dispossessing thousands of small tenant farmers, most in Scotland still loyal to the House of Stuart. In Scotland, the Enclosures or Clearances would serve a dual purpose, enhancing the profits of the rich and ridding Scotland of a threat to the English throne. Thousands of dispossessed Scottish Highlanders would be forced overseas, and there would be few corners of the world that would not benefit by receiving at least a few of these tough, hard-working exiles.
There was one way out, however, other than the drastic measure of seeking a new life overseas. Many Highlanders chose to join the army — the English army, the only one available to them. At least they would be fed and clothed, with a little money left over for their families. Thus it was that the English army came to have large contingents of its erstwhile Scottish enemies. When the English general James Wolfe faced Montcalm’s forces at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec City in 1759 as part of England’s Seven Years’ War with France, it had been only fourteen years since, as a young officer, he had faced the Scots under Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden. Perhaps understandably, he did not trust his Highland soldiers, and so he placed them at the forefront of his attack, writing to a friend that it would be “no great mischief if they fall.” (p. 109) And thus MacLeod has the title of his novel.
For those Scottish clansmen who chose to leave the British Isles, the new world of North America was a natural destination, and Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island, at the eastern tip of Nova Scotia, were the nearest points across the Atlantic to their beloved Scotland. And when the Scottish settlers arrived on Cape Breton Island, they looked around at the harsh, rain- and wind-swept island with its rocky soil, only 10 percent of which is arable, and they cried aloud, “It’s just like home!”
Be that as it may, their profound love of Scotland grew to embrace Cape Breton, their place of exile. In the novel, the patriarch of the first MacDonalds to arrive will be buried alone beneath a great boulder at the edge of the cliffs of Cape Breton, looking across the Atlantic to the Scottish Highlands from whence he came.
More than two hundred years after the first MacDonald arrived, our protagonist’s sister, Catherine, will visit Scotland and go to the ancestral village of Moidart. By the sea she encounters an old woman:
“You are from here,” said the woman.
“No,” said my sister, “I’m from Canada.”
“That may be,” said the woman. “But you are really from here. You have just been away for a while.” (p. 160)
A little later the woman says “You are home now,” (p. 167) and they speak, in Gaelic, of times long gone by and of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his defeat by the English at Culloden and they weep together over a defeat that seems to have happened only yesterday.
I am reminded of something Alistair MacLeod said while commenting on how well his novel was doing in Scotland. I quote him exactly: “I am very pleased by how much Scotland seems to like me, although I have been away for 210 years. The MacLeod people came from the Isle of Aigue in 1791.” Consider carefully the words he used. Like the characters of his novel, MacLeod is a Cape Bretoner who adores the place, but there is clearly an even older loyalty. Who but a Cape Breton Scot could say of Scotland, “I have been away for 210 years”? It is an absolute identification of himself with his dispossessed ancestors. There is no distinction between the self and the clan; the family and time itself is telescoped so that 210 years can lie within one person’s lifetime.
One of the MacDonalds who left Scotland because of the Clearances was the patriarch who will begin our saga, Calum Ruadh, “Calum the Red.” In 1779 he embarked with his second wife, Catherine, and his twelve children and his one son-in-law on a voyage to Nova Scotia in the New World. He had left his dog with the neighbours, but, according to the story passed down from one generation to another and given to our narrator by his grandfather, the frantic animal
swam after them, her head cutting a V through the water and her anxious eyes upon the departing family she considered as her own. And as they were rowed towards the anchored ship, she continued to swim, in spite of shouted Gaelic threats and exhortations telling her to go back; swimming farther and farther from the land, until Calum Ruadh, unable to stand it any longer, changed his shouts from threats to calls of encouragement and, reaching over the side, lifted her soaked and chilled and trembling body into the boat. As she wriggled wetly against his chest and licked his face excitedly, he said to her in Gaelic, “Little dog, you have been with us all these years and we will not forsake you now. You will come with us.” (p. 23)
It’s a lovely story, and I understand when our Alexander remembers his grandfather saying, “That always got to me, somehow, that part about the dog.” (p. 23)
Like Calum Ruadh MacDonald, that first dog will be fruitful and multiply, and the descendants of both immigrants, human and animal, will share both life and loyalty in the one great family, Clan Calum Ruadh.
The voyage across the Atlantic was a terrible one. Catherine died of the fever, like her sister, Calum’s first wife before her, but a granddaughter was born. After they arrived on the northern shore of Nova Scotia at Pictou’s Landing, Calum wept for two whole days. When our narrator, Alexander, hears the story from his grandfather, the grandfather is visibly moved. It was as if the landing were yesterday:
“He was,” he said, composing himself and after a thoughtful moment, “crying for his history. He had left his country and lost his wife and spoke a foreign language. He had left as a husband and arrived as a widower and a grandfather, and he was responsible for all those people clustered around him. He was,” he said, looking up to the sky, “like the goose who points the V, and he temporarily wavered and lost his courage.” (p. 25)
How typical that Grandfather should choose a simile from nature. Throughout the novel, the MacDonalds, in particular the descendants of Calum Ruadh, are at one with the animal and natural world around them.
After two weeks to recover from exhaustion, Calum and his party take a small boat for Cape Breton Island. Although technically a part of Nova Scotia, “official” settlement was not yet permitted on Cape Breton, the starkly beautiful “land of trees,” but, in practice, you could take as much land as you could squat on.
Calum Ruadh was an epic figure. He left Moidart at fifty-five and would spend another fifty-five years in his place of exile before he died at the patriarchal age of 110. Our author, Alistair MacLeod, calculated the numbers deliberately to show a love evenly divided between the place of leaving and the place of coming. Wherever they lived, loyalty, for the MacDonalds, was absolute, reciprocal, and universal within the clan. But it was not only the fierce loyalty to each other and to their own that would distinguish them over the years. Almost every descendant of Calum Ruadh would have red or raven-black hair, fair skin, and, above all, dark, dark eyes. This is why Catherine was recognized so quickly by the old woman of Moidart. This is why strangers in airports at the end of the twentieth century greet each other in Gaelic. This is why Alexander’s nephew, the son of his sister, Catherine, is stopped on a bicycle trail in Calgary by a car full of men on their way to B.C.
“What’s your name?” said one of the men, rolling down his window. “Pankovich,” he answered.… “What was your mother’s last name?” “MacDonald,” he answered. “See,” said the man to the car in general, “I told you.” And then another of the men reached into his pocket and passed him a fifty-dollar bill. “What’s this for?” asked my nephew named Pankovich. “It is,” said the man, “for the way you look. Tell your mother it is from clann Chalum Ruaidh.” (p. 30)
By the time of Alexander MacDonald’s grandparents, in the early twentieth century, logging and fishing in Cape Breton, although still the occupation of many, had become harsher and less likely to provide an adequate living. Cape Breton, “the land of trees,” had suffered from clear-logging, and the fishing was less certain. Many turned to other work, in mining sometimes, and Alexander’s father’s father, Grandpa, was glad to get regular employment as the maintenance man in the local hospital. He won the job through the efforts of his friend and cousin, Alexander’s other male grandparent, known to Alexander as Grandfather. Grandfather had worked as a carpenter on the construction of the hospital and was able to coach Grandpa on every detail of the hospital’s inner workings so that he might triumph when interviewed for the position. Alexander’s Grandpa and Grandma were always grateful to their friend and cousin, Alexander’s other grandfather. As Grandma put it, “ ‘He has always stood by us.… He has always been loyal to his blood.’ ” (p. 35)
This is only one of the innumerable examples in the novel of the positive side of tribal loyalty, the absolute reliance that one member of the clan or tribe may place on another.
Alexander’s two male grandparents “were each a balance to the other.” (p. 264) Grandfather, cautious and reflective, is a reader, always anxious to study to fill in the gaps in the oral tradition he passes on to his grandchildren. The other, Grandpa, also passes on the oral tradition, but he is full of fun and an appetite for life.
Grandfather is a man shaped by the circumstances of his birth. Born out of wedlock to a girl whose lover left to work as a logger in Maine, where he was crushed in an accident and from where he never returned, Grandfather has sought to make his life as neat and as ordered as his conception and birth were not. Describing him, Alexander tells us,
After the death of his wife in childbirth, he lived for a long time by himself, rising at exactly six a.m. and shaving and trimming his neat reddish moustache. His house was spotless, and within it he knew where everything was all of the time. And in the little building behind his house where he kept his shining tools it was the same.…
Before going to bed he would set out his breakfast dishes for the next morning; again with great precision, his plate face down and his cup inverted upon its saucer with its handle always at the same angle, and with his knife and fork and spoon each in its proper place, as if he were in a grand hotel.
His shoes were always polished and in a shining row with their toes pointing outward beneath his neatly made bed, and his teapot was always placed on exactly the same spot upon his gleaming stove. (p. 33)
In those few paragraphs Alistair MacLeod gives us a skilful delineation of a trait that gains meaning with what we learn elsewhere about Grandfather’s life. MacLeod does it throughout the novel, adding detail to detail until he achieves a perfect whole. I can think of no more fitting comparison than the way a perfectly shaped pebble is added to another perfectly shaped pebble until one has a cairn, a symmetrical pile of stones whose perfection makes the whole even more pleasing than its individual parts. It can come as no surprise to anyone that it took MacLeod more than ten years to write this novel, shaping each sentence, building each paragraph.
What I find incredible is that MacLeod used the same technique in the first short story he ever wrote. With “The Boat,” published in 1968, he emerged as a fully formed writer. It is small wonder that, when he received the 2001 IMPAC prize in Dublin, the richest prize in English literature, he was hailed as one of the world’s truly great writers. And that tribute is to a man whose entire output is contained in two volumes.
Our narrator’s grandfather had been married for only a year when his wife died in childbirth, leaving him one child, a girl, Alexander’s mother. He will spend the rest of his methodical life a lonely widower with a passion for holding the MacDonalds’ oral tradition in his mind and supplementing it by reflection and reading. Grandpa, on the other hand, is the lusty progenitor of nine children who boasts that, as a young man, every time he returned from logging in the Nova Scotia woods and again stepped onto the soil of Cape Breton he would get an erection. Once he had regular work at the hospital, he could afford a house and two acres on the edge of town, where he and Grandma find tremendous happiness in each other. They sleep in each other’s arms and they love physical contact in their daily life. When Grandpa is up a ladder on some household task, Grandma can never resist touching him behind the knees to make his legs buckle. She is as tolerant of all his weaknesses as she is aware of all his strengths. Alexander later remembers,
Sometimes when he stayed too long at the taverns, as he sometimes did in his later years, he would exhaust his money and send a “runner” to Grandma, asking for more so that he might extend his socializing. She always gave it to him, saying, “He does not do this often. And it is little enough when you consider all he has given to us.” (pp. 40-41)
One of the many exquisitely constructed little stories in the novel is about how Grandpa has too much to drink one Christmas Eve. He crumples and falls off his chair in a dead sleep.
“Whatever will we do?” she [Grandma] mused, and then brightening she said, “I know.” And going to the box of leftover Christmas tree decorations she began to extract various ornaments and strands of foil rope and even a rather tarnished star. She placed the star at Grandpa’s head and deftly strung the rope about his limbs, and placed little balls and stars at strategic places on his outstretched limbs. She strung some Christmas icicles across his chest, where they looked vaguely like outworn war medals, and then sprinkled him with some artificial snow.… And when she was finished her decorating, she took his picture. (p. 42)
Grandpa would carry a copy of that photograph on him until the day he died, and when it wore out from constant showing and re-showing, he would go to Grandma for the precious negative and have another copy made.
The love that these two people find in each other is only one of the many joys this novel has to offer. That love has its counterpart in the friendship between Grandfather and Grandpa and Grandma. As methodical Grandfather prepares the tax returns for disorganized Grandpa, Grandpa always sighs, dreaming of a refund, “My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald.” Grandma sums it all up in a line that is not only the final sentence of the novel but a litany repeated throughout the story, “All of us are better when we’re loved.”
Alexander learns an appetite for life from Grandpa and a more meditative habit from Grandfather. In his own person, Alexander creates a middle way between the two, the influence of his grandparents all the greater because of a terrible loss that Alexander endures at the age of three.
His parents had found work as lighthouse keepers on a little island just off the coast. When the ice was thick in winter, they could walk from the island back to their house and extended family on the mainland to visit and to shop in the town. One March evening they misjudged the ice as they returned to the island. Alexander, his sister, and three of his brothers had stayed on the mainland with the family. MacLeod’s quiet account of what happens to Alexander’s parents and one of his brothers is all the more terrifying because he describes, not the parents and the boy falling through the ice, but how little of the accident could be seen from the shore.
Everyone could see their three dark forms and the smaller one of the dog outlined upon the whiteness over which they travelled. By the time they were halfway across, it was dusk and out there on the ice they lit their lanterns, and that too was seen from the shore. And then they continued on their way. Then the lanterns seemed to waver and almost to dance wildly, and one described an arc in what was now the darkness and then was still. (p. 48)
It is up to the observer, and to the reader, to imagine what that stillness meant.
The twins Alexander and Catherine, only three years old, will be taken in by Grandma and Grandpa. The dog, who survived the drowning, will return to the lighthouse on the island to protect what she saw as the family home. Certain that her vanished people will rise up out of the sea, she defends the island against all comers until the new lighthouse keeper, whom she attacks, puts four bullets into her loyal heart.
Alexander’s three surviving brothers, led by the sixteen-year-old Calum, are deemed old enough to be independent. They will take over their parents’ mainland clapboard cottage and abandon the schooling they had indulged in only sporadically. They will make a subsistence living from hunting and logging and fishing, and they will be a law unto themselves. As Alexander later remembers, he and Catherine were always entranced when Grandma and Grandpa allowed them to visit their older brothers in the old family house where no one brushed their teeth, where the bathroom was a bucket, where animals wandered in and out of the rooms, and where horses “would press their noses to the window, as if to see what was going on inside.” (p. 73)
The brothers shoot animals from their windows, but only for food, and pee through the windows when the bucket seems too far away. As they grow older, to relax from the physical burden of their manual labour, they drive beaten-up, reconstructed cars to dances, fighting when challenged and always with the clan rallied behind them. They are hard and they are tough. When Calum, the oldest, standing in his boat in the fog, suffers agony from a rotting tooth and fails in his attempt to twist it out of his mouth with a pair of pliers, he ties a line from his tooth to his faithful horse Christy on shore and she yanks the tooth out of him. They are made of stern stuff, these MacDonalds, and the story of the tooth becomes another anecdote in the oral history of the clan.
It was the horror of that extraction that first inclined Alexander towards the study of dentistry, but his choice of career made his leaving Cape Breton inevitable. A professor at the University of Halifax warned him he would never make a living in a culture that valued teeth so little, and so Alexander will follow the road that leads him to wealth and Windsor.
But there is poetry along with the physical hardship in the lives of his older brothers.
Sometimes, said my brothers, the blackfish [pilot whales] would follow their boat, and they loved applause and appreciated singing. If they vanished beneath the surface, my brothers would clap their hands in rhythmic unison like fans at a sporting event, and soon they would break the surface, sometimes so close to the boat as to be almost dangerous, drawn by the sound and the perceived good fellowship. They would leap and arch and then vanish again, although my brothers knew they were never far away but seemed like children involved in games of hide and seek, hoping to startle and surprise by their unexpected nearness. Sometimes when they were invisible my brothers would sing songs to them in either English or Gaelic and place small bets as to which set of lyrics would bring them whooshing to the surface, cavorting in their giant grace around the rocking boat. (p. 99)
As adults, Calum and the two brothers go into mining, where their strength and bravery will be at a premium. But always, between shifts, be it in Peru or British Columbia or Elliott Lake north of Sudbury, they will speak of the landscape of their youth. As time passes and their distance from home seems all the greater, they speak more and more often in Gaelic. They speak of the lighthouse and the gulls and the sea and the underground spring and Grandpa bringing hay across the ice with corks fitted to Christy’s hooves so that the horse could find purchase on the ice.
This is a landscape Alistair MacLeod knows well. He is the son of an itinerant Cape Breton coal miner and was raised mainly on the family farm in Cape Breton. He worked as a logger and in hardrock mines in B.C. and Ontario to pay his way through university. He still keeps his miner’s helmet and his headlamp at his summer home on Cape Breton. I have heard him say, “Cape Breton is like my mother: I will always be her child.… I know the songs and I know the landscape and I know how snow works and I know how boats work.”
Alistair MacLeod understands well the longing that sometimes overcomes Calum and his brothers when they demand time off from their labour at the mine and drive back the hundreds of miles, defying all speed limits, to their beloved Cape Breton and their clapboard house and their pilgrimage to the island lighthouse.
Once, however, they will come back not out of longing but out of duty. They have been working as a team with other Cape Breton MacDonalds at a particularly lucrative contract at the uranium mine near Elliott Lake. There are other ethnic teams working at their side, the largest a contingent of French Canadians from Madawaska. Like the Cape Bretoners, the French of Madawaska owe loyalty not to any provincial or federal capital but to their home and to each other.
It was, I think, a marvellous narrative stroke by Alistair MacLeod to introduce another clan, another tribe, into the novel. It is clear to us that this group of French Canadians, without education or any loyalty other than to their own, are trapped in their culture. Some of them realize, but only dimly, that the same heritage that gives each of them identity and a home within their people is also a trap that prevents a full participation in the greater world outside. As we study this little group of isolated people, we realize that the same is true of Calum and the other Cape Bretoners. The two tribes illuminate each other. More than once, Alistair MacLeod has referred to Gaelic as “a beautiful prison.” The same seems to be true of the French spoken by the group from Madawaska. Tribal loyalty certainly provides identity and mutual support, but there is the danger of the world passing your culture by and turning you into a quaint oddity of the past.
The novel contains a lovely fable about a king herring who guides schools of herrings to the hungry fishermen eager to feed their families. To the fishermen, the king herring is a benefactor; to the other herring he is a traitor. It all depends on one’s point of view. Is one’s culture a haven or a trap? The very sage Alistair MacLeod seems to me to suggest that it is both. That is why he and his creation Alexander MacDonald have both left the physical place of their heritage to live in the larger society. But there is still a terrible sense of loss, and Alexander MacDonald and Alistair MacLeod both carry their culture, that beautiful prison, in their heart.
At the uranium mine, the two tribes, one led by Calum MacDonald and the other by Fern Picard, live in an uneasy state of truce. Only rarely will the tribes come together in their shared love of drinking, dancing, and the folk music of their two heritages. It is significant that the fiddler who plays for them is a Métis, neither a Cape Bretoner nor a Madawaskan, and we are again reminded of the fate that can await an isolated, inward-looking culture.
Matters come to a head when a MacDonald, a cousin of our protagonist and another red-headed Alexander, is killed in a mining accident. It is rumoured that the accident was deliberately engineered by Fern Picard and his French crew so that they might bring in more of their own number, but before accounts can be settled the MacDonalds must take their dead cousin back to Cape Breton. It is at the funeral that Alistair MacLeod gives us one of the most exquisite passages of the novel. It is the description of the coffin.
The casket was closed because he was no longer recognizable to those who once knew and loved him. Instead his picture was placed upon the casket’s surface, the picture taken at his high-school graduation. His red hair was carefully combed and his dark eyes looked hopefully into the camera. There was a boutonnière in his lapel. Beside the picture there was a small stone chip from the original Calum Ruadh boulder. About the casket were the ferns and rushes from the Calum Ruadh land. It was still too early for the summer roses, the pink and blue lupins, the yellow buttercups or the purple irises with their splashed white centres. Still too early for the delicate pink morning glories growing from their tendrils among the rocks beside the sea. Growing low and close among the rocks and seeming to derive their sustenance from an invisible source, yet quick to die if plucked and removed. (p. 126)
The fragility of the Cape Breton wild morning glory, so easily wounded if transplanted, is a wonderful evocation of the fragility and impermanence of human life, a perfectly fitting comment on the death of this young man, driven by economic necessity to leave the native land and the culture that had nourished him.
After the celebration of the funeral, the MacDonalds are induced by the superintendent of the uranium mine to return to Elliott Lake. But the MacDonald team is now a man short.
Our narrator Alexander has just graduated from dental school. A life of relative ease awaits him. But the call of the clan is an imperative, and he goes, at least for the summer, to take his cousin’s place. As it happens, he will not be the only Alexander MacDonald at the uranium mine. An American nephew of Grandpa’s, by a brother who left years before for San Francisco, is seeking refuge from the Vietnam draft and will be taken in by the MacDonald team at the mine at Elliott Lake. But this new Alexander MacDonald is not like his cousins. He is unusually insensitive in an already difficult situation. He receives the friendly greeting of Marcel Gingras, “ ‘Bonjour, comment ça va?’ ” with a curt “ ‘Why don’t you speak English? This is North America.’ ” (p. 224) Alistair MacLeod is too canny a writer to make every MacDonald into a saint, however idealized the novel may be. Worse, cousin Alexander is a thief. The theft of valuables from the French-Canadian team, together with the jealousies and suspicions, causes a fight during which Calum kills Fern Picard. The American cousin will flee, but Calum MacDonald receives life imprisonment.
As Alistair MacLeod has shown us before, loyalty to the family, the clan, the tribe can carry with it great benefits, but it can also demand a terrible price. Just as the Highland Scots lost their land because of their loyalty to Bonnie Prince Charlie, just as the dog of Alexander’s parents lost his life because of his loyalty to his family swallowed up by the sea, so Calum MacDonald will lose his freedom because of his loyalty to an American with red hair and dark, dark eyes whose name is MacDonald. Calum himself, in his later years, will observe to his brother that the loyalties of the past have caused “too many bodies and too many wars.” (p. 209)
Calum’s imprisonment until his parole after ten years marks a slowing in the forward movement of the narrative. The MacDonalds will disperse. Catherine will marry rich and live in a “modernistic house” with silent toilets in Calgary, and Alexander will go on to orthodontistic prosperity in Windsor. And what of the other two, unnamed, brothers? They are unnamed by our author to stress the point that their first names are not important. What matters is that they are MacDonalds. One will end up as a school-bus driver in B.C. Of him we know little. But the story of the last brother is a lovely one.
Waiting at a Glasgow railway station during a visit to Scotland he is hailed by a stranger as a MacDonald. He is offered a home and a job on a fish farm up in the Scottish Highlands. The incident is a kind of narrative counterweight to the earlier abuse of clan loyalty by the American cousin. I loved the conversation between the two MacDonalds at that filthy railway station. Says the stranger: “ ‘We can always make room. We can always fit you in … we’ll go to the bar. We’ll talk about … Charlie’s Year: 1745-6. If only the ships had come from France!’ ” (p. 263) And once again the past is a condition of the present. It’s a delightful little story, and, if it’s not true, it should be true!
The novel will end with two visits, both made by Alexander.
The first is to Grandma. Grandpa is long dead. He died in the fullness of his living, “from jumping up in the air and trying to click his heels together twice.” (p. 264) It was Grandma who had encouraged him, after two failures, to make the third, fatal attempt. Now Grandma is in a nursing home at the age of 110. She is the last of her generation who lived fully in the Gaelic Cape Breton culture. She is the age of the founder of that culture, Calum Ruadh, and thus does Alistair MacLeod neatly complete the circle of his story.
Grandma’s mind is wandering, but, like many in her situation, she has a profound memory of the far past. She and Alexander sing together in Gaelic, but she does not recognize him. When he does identify himself as gille beag ruadh, the little red-headed boy,
She looks at me with bemusement, as if I am beyond the preposterous.
“Oh, the gille beag ruadh,” she says. “The gille beag ruadh is thousands of miles from here. Yet I would know him if I met him anywhere in this whole wide world. He will always have a piece of my heart.” (p. 272)
The memory is flawed but the love is perfect, and Alexander is bathed in the full force of his family’s love for him and again invokes the litany “All of us are better when we’re loved.”
All that remains in the novel is Alexander’s last visit to his drink-sodden brother Calum on Toronto’s Skid Row. This is Calum of the clan Calum Ruadh, the Calum MacDonald hailed generously by Marcel Gingras, a member of another tribe, as “ ‘the best miner we ever saw.’ ” This is the Calum MacDonald who was once flown two thousand miles to blast a rock face no one else knew how to bring down, and who could also spend a gentle afternoon with his retired old horse Christy and feed her and sing to her as they gave and received love one to and from the other. Now he shakes so much he can drink the alcohol his brother brings him only out of a plastic bowl. But he can look through the window of his pathetic room and see, not the filth and garbage of a Toronto back alley, but the cliffs and the beauty of Cape Breton and the grave of his ancestor.
Calum knows his death is imminent, and he has called his brother to him, as he did before at the cousin’s funeral so many years before. “ ‘It’s time,’ he says. ‘Time to go.’ ” (p. 276) The call of the blood is absolute, and Alexander comes to the rooming house to take his brother home to Cape Breton.
As they drive, they talk as they talked during the visit six months earlier that began the novel, when they leaned “into one another like two tired boxers in the middle of the ring. Each giving and seeking the support of the other.” (p. 191) It seemed to me that only in his conversations with Calum and with his sister, when the talk is of memory, does Alexander really come alive. After all, he is an orthodontist, and as Grandpa once pointed out, (p. 107) how much is there to say about thirty-two teeth?
When the two brothers get to the causeway across the Canso Strait that has joined Cape Breton to the mainland since 1955, MacLeod demonstrates his mastery of pure narrative excitement.
Calum takes the wheel. The police have warned them not to try to cross the storm-swept causeway, but Calum, so close to his beloved Cape Breton, finds once again his old strength.
The car springs forward. The red engine light is on, the engine is roaring, and the water comes in at the bottom of the doors. The windshield wipers are thick with ice and stop dead. He rolls down the window and sticks his head out into the gale to see where he is going on the invisible road. We are hit by one wave and then another. The car rocks with the force of the blows. The causeway is littered with pieces of pulpwood and dead fish. He weaves around the obstacles. The wheels touch the other side.
“Here,” he says, “you can do the driving now. We’re almost home.” (p. 281)
At that moment, he dies. Alexander tells us:
I turn to Calum once again. I reach for his cooling hand which lies on the seat beside him. This is the man who carried me on his shoulders when I was three. Carried me across the ice from the island, but could never carry me back again.
Out on the island the neglected fresh-water well pours forth its gift of sweetness into the whitened darkness of the night.
Ferry the dead.… Peace to his soul.
‘All of us are better when we’re loved.’ (p. 283)
As I finished the novel, I realized that, apart from a brief reference to the Vietnam War, there had been only two pages of references to the great figures of the outside world or to the great events of that world. (pp. 245-46) This has been a very sharply focused study of culture and loyalty within the tribe and the negative and positive implications of that loyalty.
One might also see the novel as a contrast between the spiritual emptiness of the modern city, with its perfect teeth and silent toilets, and the densely felt, mythic past of an isolated culture, but it is a contrast, not a contest. The victory of the city was inevitable.
The Gaelic Cape Breton culture was doomed when logging and fishing and farming could no longer provide a sufficient living and the young people had to leave the place of their heart to make a living elsewhere. That is why our narrator, throughout the novel, is so interested in the immigrant, itinerant fruit pickers of Southern Ontario. Any culture that cannot provide work for its young is in great danger. Cape Breton Island culture was doomed the moment it was no longer capable of renewing itself economically.
In the sixteen short stories he has published over the last thirty-three years, now reissued by McClelland & Stewart as one collection, Island, MacLeod has always written of the tribalism and the loyalty and the harshness of life on his cherished Cape Breton. In the short stories, even more than in his novel, MacLeod makes specific references to the end of the Gaelic culture.
In the first great short story, “The Boat,” the Cape Breton past is sold in shops. Tourists buy tapes of the old Gaelic songs that few people understand any more. In his final short story, ironically called “The Clearances” (1999), Germans are buying the shoreline of the island for vacation homes. The way of life begun in 1779 by Calum Ruadh MacDonald is over.
In No Great Mischief it is Alexander who is telling the story. To whom is he speaking? Who is the internal audience? His wife may not be able to feel the story as he does; she is from somewhere in Eastern Europe where the men of her family were killed or disappeared into one of Stalin’s gulags. It is not a culture she is likely to miss. Exile for her means asylum, not alienation.
It is more likely that Alexander is telling the story to his children, new MacDonalds, that they might know from whence they came, that they might understand when a stranger offers them kindness because of the way they look. He is playing for them the role his grandfather and grandpa played for him.
The novel is above all a love song to Cape Breton Island and, at the same time, it is a lament. Within the novel, it is a lament by a middle-aged meditative orthodontist. Outside the novel, the work is a love song and lament by a sixty-five-year-old recently retired professor of English at the University of Windsor. Alistair MacLeod is lamenting the end of the Gaelic culture of seven generations of his family in exile from the Scottish Highlands.
But a part of the lament is also a celebration of the one great truth his Cape Breton culture had to teach: “All of us are better when we’re loved.”