Sheldon Currie

No Great Mischief, a novel by Alistair MacLeod, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1999.

Mu dheireadh thall. Agus gu brath. R.J. MacSween, the founder of The Antigonish Review, and Professor of English Literature at St.Francis Xavier University, used to tell his students of 20th Century Literature that the purpose of fiction is to help the reader imagine what it felt like to live in a particular place at a particular time. Alistair MacLeod was once a student in MacSween's course in modem poetry and fiction, and his novel, No Great Mischief, might serve as a practical illustration of his teacher's theory. The future historian wanting to know what it was like to live in Canada during a large chunk of the 20th Century will find this novel an invaluable document. MacLeod's talent as a social historian is exceeded only by his ability to create extraordinary characters working through ordinary, terrifying tragedy.

No Great Mischief is a story of Cape Breton and its disapora. It is a tale of "going down the road," going back up the road, and of the sorrows and joys, defeats and victories of people forced by economic hardship to abandon their homes, families, and, except for the remnants they could carry in their heads and hearts, their language and music, which sometimes they could salvage and sometimes not. It is the story of loss. A loss of no great consequence to the many who have themselves become lost in the labyrinth of the century's technology, but an important loss to those whose cultural memory has not been completely paved over with stuff.

No Great Mischief is an historical tale of an extended family, a Mac Donald clan, known in Gaelic as the clann Chalum Ruaidh, Red Malcolm's Family, named after the man who left Scotland when he was fifty-five in 1779 with his sick wife and their twelve children and son-in-law, as well as their determined dog who swam after the ship until his master scooped him out ofthe water. All survived the trip but Catherine the wife and mother. So the dog too became an immigrant in Cape Breton, and like Malcolm himself, became a prolific progenitor of prolific progenitors.

In Cape Breton the redheaded MacDonalds again faced economic hardship and fled to places all over North America and beyond. They carried their family history withthem and frequently returned in imagination, and less often in reality, to the single-grave graveyard of Calum Mac Donald on the western cliff of Cape Breton Island, looking across the path of the North Atlantic to the Highland island from which he came. One of his ancestors, Alexander MacDonald, nicknamed, gille beag ruadh, little red-headed boy, is the narrator of the story. He was bom in Cape Breton at the edge of the ocean and now is an orthodontist somewhere in southern Ontario.

When Alexander was three years old he and his twin sister and their older brothers became orphaned when their mother and father and Colin, a brother, fell through the ice on their way out to an island where they kept the lighthouse. The three-year-old twins played in blissful innocence in their grandparent's living room while the tragedy played itself out. Afterwards they stayed where they were and their grandparents became their parents. Their older brothers were too old to stay with their grandparents and since they could not inherit the lighthouse job they were forced to make a living on the old farm, eking out a meager subsistence with undeveloped skills on a deficient land and a moody ocean.

The separation of the MacDonald siblings allows the novel its broadest meaning. The three-year-old twin brother and sister are brought up by the relatively well off grandparents whose fortunes were enriched when the grandfather got a job as super-visor of the new local hospital's maintenance department. They raised the twins in comfort and afforded them opportunities denied their older brothers. Consequently the brothers remained in their culture, imprisoned in it. When they did escape they became economic exiles in the underground mines of other provinces and countries with nothing in their lives but money, hard work and alcohol. The twins became well educated, upper middle class sophisticates. When the novel opens the orthodontist is making his weekly trip to Toronto to meet with Calum his oldest brother who is living as an alcoholic hennit in a cheap rooming house on Queen Street. They spend some time reviewing the past, their shared, all but lost heritage. They speak sometimes in Gaelic and sometimes they sing the old Gaelic songs. They recall their common experiences in the brothers' boat and on the farm when Alexander and his sister visited. Both Alexander and Calum feel uncomfortable with the necessary abandonment of the culture that bound together the now scattered brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins of their clan. But the poignant reality is that one ofthem is rich, healthy and successful, the other is poor, sick, and a failure; one of them is troubled by nostalgia, the other is struggling to contain bitterness and anger.

As the story unfolds, the reader begins to realize how much has changed in so little time in the 20th century. The narrator is like many Cape Bretoners his age who are able to wander around in ample, bidet-equipped bathrooms while they recall sitting in solitude in single or multi-holed outhouses meditating on life's vicissitudes with the aid of the Timothy Eaton Bible. Fishermen in their fifties or sixties working their trade on ocean going fish-factory trawlers can recall making a living hand-lining from a dory, and as in MacLeod's story, whistling for the horse to come and pull the boat ashore and up the beach. One of the many poignant moments of culture clash occurs when the grandmother is visiting her grandson in agriculture-rich Southern Ontario:

 My grandmother ... burst into tears
 at the sight of the rejected and
 overripe Tomatoes. She wept for what
 she called "an a@ful waste" and had
 almost to be restrained from running
 into the fields to "save" the tomatoes
 from their fate in the approaching
 furrows. She was fifteen hundred miles
 from her preserving kettle, and had
 spent decades of summers and autumns
 nurturing her few precious plants in
 rocky soil and in shortened arowing
 seasons ... The lost and wasted
 tomatoes which she saw outside
 Leamington depressed my grandmother
 for days.

Sometimes when he is working in his comfortable work station preparing, to improve the mouth and image and perhaps the self esteem of a client who sits patiently anticipating apainiess transfon-nation from before to after, the orthodontist from Cape Breton feels a long way from the land and sea of his youth. Sometimes he consoles himself with the memory of his first experience with dental extraction. At the end of a day's fishing his brother Calum, unable to stand the pain of a rotting tooth, ties one end of a line to the tooth and another to his horse and slapped him into a gallop

No Great Mischief is full of such nostalgic juxtapositions and historical ironies that underline the enormous changes that have occurred in the 20th century and the tremendous acceleration of events, leaving behind a lot of hardship and suffering as well as a lot of the pleasures and comforts that can only come from a stable culture based on a common memory The immigrant's dilemma: do you pack up your language and its related cultural artifacts and send them to a museum to be cared for by a scholarly curator, while you go down the road of progress where you can afford you and yours the care of a meditative orthodontist? Or do you stay with an ever diminishing cohort of relatives and perhaps become a prisoner in a static culture which has lost its power of renewal. Canada is a country with hundreds of ethnic groups with the same dilemma, and the Scottish Highlanders are perhaps one the more tenacious, but it seems only the French, and only the French of Quebec show any sign of being able to live in the modem world and keep their culture intact.

Another device that binds the novel's dislocated time sequences is the juxtaposition of fable and historical events. The twin sister Catherine recalls her grandfather's retelling the story of the Glencoe herring: the people of Glencoe believed the herring were ledby a king who they thought of as a friend who brought them food and so they took care to avoid hurting him because they thought that if he trusted them he would always bring the herring to them. But then her grandfather said:

 Think of it from the point of view
 of the other herring ... They were
 really being betrayed by him. He was
 leading them to their
 deaths...

The grandfather is no doubt thinking of the famous betrayal at Glencoe. And he is thinking of Culloden and Killiecrankie and other bloody battles in which the Highlanders showed off their penchant for perilous loyalty. And he is likely thinking about his daughter's family dog that died defending his family's island after the parents were drowned and the family dispersed. "It was in those dogs to care too much and to try too hard."

The two grandfathers are delightful characters, the one. full of fun and enthusiasm, the other cautious and meditative. They dominate the novel like two medieval allegorical figures representing opposing human attributes, and by their talk, attitudes and behavior imply the need to find a middle ground, to temper bravery with caution and to make sure loyalty is not misplaced. They are old enough to remember all the stories and songs from the oral culture that is fast disappearing and so they are able to bind together the past and the present and give meaning to the history of their clan.

Alistair MacLeod enjoys a place in 20th century North American literature not enjoyed by very many writers. Like Ernest Hemingway his work gets high and well-deserved praise from literary critics and the general population. This is his first novel, but it is not a departure in story or theme. For years he has been carving beautiful short stories that demonstrate his extraordinary narrative skills; his mastery of character development and his command of rhythm have been exciting the minds and hearts of readers everywhere. There is nothing sentimental about his stories, but it is impossible to read some of them, eg: "In the Fall," without czying. Even inexperienced readers recognize his characters and understand their longings and their fears. The music of his language seems as familiar land haunting as a melody remembered from childhood. This is his first novel. We'll be waiting for the next one. But this one is here. At long last. And forever.

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