ISLAND: THE COMPLETE STORIES
Paperback
By Alistair MacLeod
430 pp. New York:
Vintage International. $14

Reviewed by Jean R. Webster

Alistair MacLeod has said of his working style that he considers what he is writing about for a long time before putting words down, that he knows the story he will write very well before it begins. It is easy to believe this, considering that the writing of these sixteen stories spans thirty-one years.
But, it’s not the length of time it took to write the words that makes this book so valuable. What is valuable about Island (for the reader, and for the writer of short fiction) are the words he chose to keep.

The stories in Island are based on the people and the life of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where MacLeod grew up. His characters are fishermen and miners and farmers, harsh livelihoods anywhere in the world, but working at them in the inhospitable north Atlantic makes them harsher. And MacLeod doesn’t gentle down their lives; he doesn’t spare the reader any of the difficulties. In story after story, we are confronted with matters of life and death, and the complexities of relationships between parents and children (mostly fathers and sons), and he does so in plain, but elegant language. So plain, his telling can sometimes make you cringe from the blows that life deals his characters. So elegant the language might be a written form of photography, pulling your eye into the very midst of their lives while they are living them.

The lives of men and boys loom largest in this series, but women—particularly mothers—represent the steadfast character of the islanders. The mother in “The Boat,” the first story in the book, virtually sets the scene for many of the other women in this collection when she tells her teenage son that it’s his obligation to stay at home and work with his father in the boat.

Like her island sisters in other stories, this mother is unwavering in her belief that the old life is the best life, the only life. In her opinion, children–and, for that matter, fathers, too, as in “The Boat”–should not look to the outside world, or to book reading for their future–even for their pleasure. She declares, “In the next world God will see to those who waste their lives reading useless books when they should be about their work.”

The story title is clear. Life to this wife and mother is all about “The Boat.” Every day, she asks her husband—and later her son—“Well, how did it go in the boat today? Were you scared in the boat today?” Question after question end with “the boat,” demonstrating its major place in their lives.

Home to MacLeod’s characters means more than the house in which they grew up. Home is the land, the father and mother, the livelihood of that household, that family. These are strong links, and the connection goes much deeper than mere walls and furniture. In “The Return,” a man who’d left his home when he was young, earned a law degree, and set up a law practice in Montreal, learns just how deep is this connection when he returns for a visit with his wife and ten-year-old son.

Here, the story and the island are seen through the eyes of the ten-year-old who hears a conversation that must have taken place many times between the elders and the boy’s father. The boy’s grandmother reminds his father that he had left at a time when his own father needed him to be at his side in the mines.

In typical MacLeod fashion, the man’s mother—“standing very tall”—tells her son he is more lost to her than the son who’d died, “and is buried under tons of rock two miles beneath the sea....” In her mind, staying is most important, for “it seems that we can only stay forever if we stay right here. As we have stayed to the seventh generation. Because in the end that is all there is—just staying.”

This staunchness is a theme carried throughout the book. The feeling that no matter how hard life is, no matter what you might want to do with your life...you are here, this land is a part of you, and you are a part of it. You cannot leave.

“The Tuning of Perfection,” is one of the few stories written in third person. Here, MacLeod follows the method used in other stories, where in a rather meandering way, he fills in the background of Archibald and the woman he loves and eventually marries. The two of them are deeply in love, and marriage does not lessen that love. They share a tradition of singing the Gaelic songs that had been handed down through generations.

After the birth of three girls, his wife dies while delivering his first son. Archibald continues his life in the house he’d built with his wife, and eventually becomes known as “the last of the authentic old-time Gaelic singers.” Through one of his granddaughters and her need to earn money, he agrees to direct members of his family to sing one of their songs in a competition to be aired on television.

Through rehearsals with twenty family members who care little for the tradition but want to go to the city and be on television, Archibald stubbornly hangs on to the belief that they must preserve the authenticity of the songs. Even meeting other competitors who are less dedicated to the true songs does not sway Archibald. He insists his family sing all the verses and pronounce the ancient language correctly.

Though they are a shoe-in for the production, Archibald finally pulls out of the proceedings. He cannot sing the song the way the director wants, and he will not abandon his principles just to go to the city and be on television. In the end, however, after all is said and done, Archibald has kept his personal standards, and learns that others respect him for it.

While the style and language of MacLeod’s stories are a joy to read, there is very little joy for his characters. Only one story, “Second Spring,” gives the reader some respite from the angst and seriousness of the remainder of the book.

The story is about a seventh-grade boy and the calf club wish, in which the boy must take a cow of “high quality” from his family farm to a pure bred bull, so he can breed her. The wish is for the perfect calf to be born the following spring. Before the meeting of the two “intendeds,” the story is filled with days and weeks of life on a dairy farm, its up and downs. When finally the boy can begin the five-mile journey with his cow, we feel as though we’ve lived through the waiting time with him.

With a cow in heat leading the way, the journey to the specified bull is faster than the boy can imagine. But another bull they encounter along the way does not fit the standards in the boy’s book, and he knows he’s in trouble as he watches the animal approach—nature having taken its course. “He was not running at all like those bulls run in the jokes about bulls after cows. None of us, I knew, were in any joke.” The end of the story shows the boy’s disappointment that the calf was not perfect, but he has moved on to the next phase of his life.

Written in the first person, many of the stories have the flavor of a memoir or a journal entry. Opening phrases are similar: “I am speaking now of a July in the early 1970s and it is the morning...” starts “The Road to Rankin’s Point.” Similarly, in “Winter Dog,” he begins as though he’s sitting at his desk at the end of the day, recording that “I am writing this in December. In the period close to Christmas....”

In this way, MacLeod draws us into an intimate scene with the characters. He gives a feeling of continuity from story to story, although each takes place at a different time and place, and with people who are not related. Nor did they ever know each other.

But, they are linked in spirit, linked by their shared ethnicity, by their personal nature, and the nature of the land and the kind of existence they must live on that land.

In spite of the harshness of the land, and the lives the people lead, this remains a wonderful book. The stories are genuine, written in MacLeod’s clear, descriptive style that takes you into homes where mothers compel sons to remain by their fathers’ sides. They also take you into the boat in mid-winter, where one minute a boy looks back and sees his father, his face and beard covered in ice, and the next he turns and his father is gone forever.

Alistair MacLeod has long been one of Canada’s most important writers, but his reputation had not migrated to this country until his novel, No Great Mischief, published in 2000, attracted people’s attention. Surely, Island’s stories will cement his reputation as a fine writer of regional fiction.

 

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