Short Stories: The doyenne of the story mixes memoir, genealogy and fiction to magnificent effect.
If there is not already a genre called diasporic fiction then veteran Canadian doyenne of the short story Alice Munro has created it with her latest collection. The View from Castle Rock is a curious melange - part memoir, part geneaology, part fiction - and it comes with a health warning from the author. In the slightly defensive foreword, Munro explains the genealogy of the work itself - a belated interest in the history of her Scottish forebears coupled with a number of unpublished stories written over the years which didn't quite fit into her other anthologies. But she insists, these are all stories, albeit more personal than she has written before.
This gives the collection a valedictory feel. Rather in the way of John McGahern's Memoir, the territory of the later stories of the collection, both actual and emotional, will be very familiar to any loyal Munro reader. We have tread this way before. Rural Canada - and the landscape here is hugely important - the hard-working poor, and the minute and exquisite disquisition of character that are Munro's literary trademarks, but this time they are come upon more directly.
"When you write about real people you are always up against contradictions," remarks the narrator of Working for A Living, ostensibly a story of her father's relationship with his parents, in what seems to be the defeated observation of a beleaguered fiction writer. But it is all part of the debate contained in these pages between the expansive art of fiction and the austere reductionism of history.
The title story of the collection is a classic example. It concerns the sea voyage Andrew Laidlaw takes in the early 1800s from Scotland to Canada with his wife, Agnes, his brother Walter, sister Mary, his father, Old James, and his young son, also James. It is a serpentine narrative in Munro's hands. The baton passes from Old James, a garrulous old man steeped in the oral tradition, to Walter, the brother who keeps a diary of the journey, to the sullen, long-suffering Agnes, who gives birth during the voyage, and then to Andrew, the paterfamilias prematurely burdened with the responsibilities of an extended and warring brood. There is Mr Suter, the surgeon, who assists at the sea birth, who attempts to break through the scornful peasant hostility of the pregnant mother. There is the wine merchant, Mr Carbert's daughter Nettie, who has the cloud of TB hanging over her, who befriends Walter in a touching, adolescent flirtation which her father encourages, knowing that this is the only love she is likely to know. Andrew's sister, Mary, a dwarf fiercely protective of her nephew - more of a mother to him than his own - joins in the dancing as the passengers get their first view of land, and young James utters his first word - "key".
We follow this rich array of characters as they reach Newfoundland and view the shores of their new homeland. And then Munro, the fiction magician, leaves us and Munro the documentary genealogist takes over. "These travellers," she relates, "lie buried . . . in the graveyard of Boston Church, in Esquesing, in Halton County."
The brute facts of their end - the child James dies within a month of arrival in Canada - in comparison with the hectic vivacity with which Munro has drawn these characters comes as a shock since we realise that the rich fictional resonances she has laid down will never come to flower. This sharp withdrawal into the harshness of fact is certainly deliberate. Fate, Munro seems to be saying, is merciless.
There follows a number of stories about other branches of the family - one which settles in Illinois, and then on to the next generation in The Wilds of Morris Township, in which the children of those doughty Scottish sea voyagers settle and breed and tame the countryside, before Munro moves on seamlessly to her father's generation and then on to her own. If there's a theme common to all the stories it is the terrible fragility of life and the persistent melancholy of mortality, emphasised by Munro's own brush with cancer, catalogued in What Do You Want To Know For? - surely an echo of the careful, wary voice of those Scottish ancestors.
IF THIS ALL sounds like a 1970s concept album, it would give the wrong impression. Munro has always been a writer of the utmost subtlety so the threads that bind her to the gritty Laidlaws who cross the ocean are woven with the utmost delicacy. She uses a kind of implosive epiphany so that the reader is left to make the subterranean connections between the joyless Presbyterian ancestors and the stoic, circumspect lives they spawned down the generations. The most direct line between these people and Munro herself is, of course, writing; the urge to record, both theirs and hers, and thus remember and honour.
"We are beguiled," Munro writes in Messenger, the last story in this book. "It happens mostly in our old age, when our personal futures close down and we cannot imagine - sometimes cannot believe in - the future of our children's children. We can't resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life."
This is a deeply moving and contemplative book. If it is a valediction, then it is a magnificent one.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and teacher of creative writing
The View from Castle Rock By Alice Munro Chatto & Windus, 352pp. £15.99