Norton: New York, 1999
ISBN 0-393-04970-1
$23.95
In No Great Mischief, Canadian short story writer Alistair MacLeod has written a great, sprawling novel of enduring connections and family loyalty.
The 20th-century MacDonalds, still known in Cape Breton as clann Chalum Ruaidh, in Gaelic, (pronounced Kwown calum rooah), “the children (or the family) of the red Calum,” are descended from a red-haired Scottish Highlander who emigrated to Nova Scotia in the aftermath of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s defeat at Culloden, in 1745. (The author includes snippets of history, both Scottish and Canadian, which affect the MacDonalds.)
The story examines the lasting effects of a family tragedy. As parents, teenage brothers, mid-size brother, three-year-old twins and family dog cross the ice from their island lighthouse to visit family on Cape Breton, the ice gives, and the parents and mid-size brother drown.
The twins, Alexander, the narrator, whom family members still call gille beag ruadh, (little red boy or red-haired boy), and his sister, who looks “like those heroines of the Scottish ballads with ‘milk white skin and hair as black as the raven’s wing,’ ” remain on Cape Breton, raised by their grandparents. Too old to be treated as children and taken in by relatives, the yet not yet adult 14-, 15- and 16-year-old brothers, considered not yet capable of lighthouse-keeping, move into their grandparents’ former house on the island.
The teenagers’ formal education ends with their parents’ deaths and they raise themselves haphazardly using their wits and tools, including fishing nets, a boat and a horse given them by relatives.
Looking back on childhood visits to his older brothers, Alexander recalls, “In the winter evenings my brothers would sit around their kitchen table bathed in the orange glow of their kerosene lamp; their gestures becoming exaggerated shadows thrown upon the walls, almost like friezes or the cave paintings of primitive men… When they spoke it was often in Gaelic, which remained the language of the kitchen and the country for almost a generation after it became somewhat unfashionable in the living rooms of the town.”
The twins go on to college. Alexander becomes an orthodontist; his sister, an actress who marries well. The older brothers, roughened by their hard life, become itinerant, sought-after coal miners who travel throughout the world plying their trade. But the bonds among grandparents, coal mining brothers and much younger twins remain remarkably strong, particularly those between Alexander and his oldest brother, Calum. The sense of loyalty and sorrow that infused the love between brothers in A River Runs Through It permeates No Great Mischief. Both books paint elegiac portraits of family ties, though alcoholism and violence play their sad, destructive roles.
When the murder of a kinsman leaves the family coal mining team one man short, Alexander, then in college, spends his summer working with his older brothers deep in the mines.
He recalls, “It was always something of a surprise to come to the surface and to be reacquainted with the changes of weather and of time. Sometimes it would be four in the morning and the night would be giving way to dawn, and the stars began to redden with the promise of sun. Sometimes the moon would gleam whitely above us and my brothers would say, ‘Chointhe, lochran aigh nam bochd.’ ‘Look, the lamp of the poor.’ And sometimes at the appearance of the new moon Calum would bow or almost curtsy in the old way and repeat the verses taught him by the old Calum Ruadh men of the country…”
William MacLeish, son of poet Archibald MacLeish, makes mention in something I read recently of a book, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, that his father read to him as a child. “Archie read it to me often – sang it to me, really, since it is almost impossible to read a good English translation of Gaelic without slipping into the music of the original.” Here’s a verse in English of what fictional Calum sang to the new moon.
Glory forever to thee so bright
Thou moon so white of this very night;
Thouself forever thou dost endure
As the glorious lantern of the poor.
No Great Mischief is a lovingly written tribute to a people and a way of life. Although MacLeod is by nature a short story writer – some of his chapters are stories complete in themselves – he has woven all the MacDonald familial strands into a strong, enduring hawser of a novel.