For anyone Irish or Scottish, parts of the eastern coast of Canada are both strange and familiar. If you walk into a bar in St John's in Newfoundland, for example, and study the faces - the half-friendly, half-awkward watchfulness - you could easily be in rural Ireland. And it is even stranger when you listen to the accents: you hear the vowel sounds of south Kilkenny, east Waterford and south Wexford intact after more than 200 years in Talamh an Eisc. And you find that people in this world view themselves not as Canadians or North Americans, but Scottish or Irish.
Alistair MacLeod, who was born in 1936, was brought up in Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. Over the last 32 years he has produced only 16 short stories, and these stories have slowly become famous for their control of tone and cadence and for MacLeod's ability to handle pure, raw emotion, something which most contemporary authors fear more than failure itself. His stories of childhood are fearless in their concern with the drama of a small moment of wrenching terror or sadness in rural life. But the most powerful stories deal with displacement, someone who comes from this stable and intact and binding society moving out to the city and then going home for a while and belonging neither at home nor in the city.
The drama in MacLeod's stories is simple and stark. Most of his stories are technically perfect; he handles a present tense narrative superbly. He is also brave: the world he describes is old-fashioned and the emotions he explores seem old-fashioned too. Neither contemporary trends nor modern ironies interest him. The genius of his stories is to render his fictional world as timeless.
No Great Mischief is his first novel and it is set in Cape Breton. MacLeod is interested once more in the drama surrounding ties of blood. One of the remarkable aspects of this book is the lack of a religious background; there is almost no mention of religion. If family and the natural universe take the place of religion, then these people are fundamentalists. They are descendants of Calum MacDonald who came from the Highlands of Scotland in 1779 to Cape Breton. They know the story of his voyage and where he is buried, and are obsessed with the tragic history of the Scotland he left behind.
The narrator, Alexander MacDonald, one of MacLeod's displaced figures, who comes from this family, has the shared, painful legacy etched in his consciousness and his affections. He is, however, no longer a subsistance farmer or a fisherman. He is an orthodontist in contemporary Canada. His narrative is rational and sad, both locked into memory and capable of understanding the forces that shaped him and his family. He is a classic insider-outsider narrator.
The book uses three timescales. It deals with what is happening to this family now. It also dramatises the distant history of the family and Scotland. And then - and this part is the central focus of the book - it tells the story of our narrator's upbringing and early manhood.
This story is as gripping and as emotionally draining for the reader as anything MacLeod has done. The landscape and harshness of Cape Breton are beautifully, meticulously imagined. The death of Alexander's parents on the ice on their way to the lighthouse, the rearing of Alexander and his sister by their grandparents as their older siblings run wild, the atmosphere which is governed by a searing love, by family loyalty as a fierce addiction, all of these things are captured with a clear precision. They are perfect, as are the characters of the grandparents and the sense of Scottish music and Scottish culture which runs through their lives.
As the novel moves on, MacLeod proves that he can handle plot and narrative development with the same ease and skill as he handles the telling, dramatic moment in his short stories. The older brothers become miners, and, on the death of his cousin, Alexander joins them. The scenes in the camp, the rivalry between groups, the work itself, the camaraderie, are handled with immense dramatic skill. And the tragic end, in all its inevitability, has once more to do with what MacLeod in the title of one of his stories calls "the lost salt gift of blood".
Because Alexander's own story is so powerful, the lessons in Scottish history in the novel seem oddly pale. It is perhaps a measure of MacLeod's talent that a rotten tooth or a simple boat journey or a new jacket can have more impact than the battle of Culloden. Also, while the scenes set in the present between Alexander and his older brother serve to frame the novel, the scenes with his sister, who has become a rich Canadian, merely serve to dilute the novel's grim power.
In the end, although you wish they would disappear, these are minor matters. The novel is close to being a masterpiece. The characters, the light and the weather, the story itself - its beautiful tone and shape, its harsh and melancholy music - stay with you for days afterwards. The novel is simply breath-taking in its emotional range. It is likely with this novel that MacLeod will finally be recognised as an important figure in contemporary prose fiction. His collected stories will shortly be reissued by Vintage.
Colm Toibin's most recent novel is The Blackwater Lightship