The island of the title refers to Cape Breton, which is separated from the rest of Nova Scotia by the Strait of Canso. The author, born and raised there, wrote his 16 poignant stories of the Scots and Irish, mostly fishermen and coal miners, between 1968 and 1999. Each story is written with love and compassion, but not a bit of sentimentality.
The sudden shift from beauty or sadness to the cold reality of something harsh and frequently sexual – human or animal – appears often in the same sentence. The element of the unexpected in each story catches the reader off-guard.
In The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, for example, the narrator speaks of never having understood the mystery of fog. “I would perhaps like to capture it in a jar like the beautiful childhood butterflies that always die in spite of the airholes punched with nails in the covers of their captivity – leaving behind the vapors of their lives and deaths; or perhaps as the unknowing child who collects the grey moist condoms from the lovers’ lanes, only to have them taken from him and to be told to wash his hands.”
While in many of the stories place names are given in Gaelic and some characters sing Gaelic songs, the author gracefully translates and the Gaelic, somehow, is not intrusive. Rather, it gives the reader a flavor, a sense of the otherness of Cape Breton.
As I read these stories – my third reading, and I have come away from each astonished at their quality – I asked myself how I would compare them with other stories. After much consideration, I think I would equate MacLeod’s Island: The Complete Stories with James Joyce’s Dubliners. They’re that good. And there’s an element in MacLeod’s sonorous, formal, almost archaic use of language that makes me think that, like Isak Dineson, the pen name of Danish writer Karen Blixen, he may have a deep acquaintance with the King James Version of the Bible. Granted, none of those writers wrote in American English, but I think it’s more than that: it has to do with construction, rhythm, beauty of language.
On almost every page I flagged a quotable sentence, paragraph or more. MacLeod’s descriptions of the lives of fishing families ring so true. As I read the fishing stories, I kept being reminded of the reason Beal’s Islander Junior Backman and others founded the Down East Lobstermen’s Association. As he has said so many times, “Down East Maine is closer to the Canadian Maritimes than to Massachusetts.” He was talking about the fierce, three-story tides that force fishermen to fish only in the slack period between them. Perhaps Cape Breton tides aren’t as strong as those in the Bay of Fundy, but I suspect Cape Breton fishermen have to endure colder temperatures than their Down East counterparts. MacLeod describes what I’d consider close to Arctic conditions.
McLeod’s stories about the coal miners ring true, too, at least to this reviewer who used to be married to someone from a Pennsylvania-Welsh coal mining family. When I read, in The Vastness of The Dark, “For today I leave behind this grimy Cape Breton coal-mining town whose prisoner I have been all of my life. And I have decided that almost any place must be better than this one with its worn-out mines and smoke-black houses …” Those words could have been spoken by my father-in-law. He, too, left his played-out mining town for a better life, and put his son through college and medical school. We took him back to be buried. I’d never seen a coal-mining town and was shocked at its monochrome, smoke-blackened houses. I was more astonished upon opening his sister’s door and seeing brilliant color – I remember bright green – inside. You couldn’t have paid me to live there; it was too depressing.
Another heart-breaking story, The Return, tells, through the eyes of a 10 year-old boy, of a family visit to Cape Breton. Of a father who loves his island family but who wanted a life other than coal mining. Of a mother who loathes his Cape Breton family, whom she considers filthy, alcoholic heathens. And of a boy whose cousins stick by him. In that mix is love and longing and ugliness and beauty.
But why do I bother summing up story plots when all I want to say is, Read This Book. The New York Times Book Review referred to MacLeod as “a great writer” and hailed Island as a New York Times notable book, stating, “The sixteen exquisitely crafted stories in Island prove Alistair MacLeod to be a master. Quietly, precisely, he has created a body of work that is among the greatest to appear in English in the last fifty years.” My only question is why is such a great writer, whose works have been translated into many languages including Italian, Norwegian, Gaelic, and Urdu, not better known outside of his own country?