Alistair MacLeod: No great mischief

By MARGIE THOMSON

With the brilliant Michael Ondaatje describing Alistair MacLeod as "one of the great undiscovered writers of our time", one must sit up and take this novel by the 65-year-old Canadian former professor seriously.

In fact, so marvellous is it that MacLeod is undiscovered no longer. He has arrived with the force of a winter storm on the Cape Breton coast - the place MacLeod comes from, and which he recreates as a kind of spiritual heart for his novel - and has carried off the world's most valuable literary prize, the International Impac Dublin Literary Award.

Many years ago, in 1779, the founding ancestor of what has, in the story, become a distinct Nova Scotia clan, Calum Ruadh, made the long, dangerous journey from Scotland to the New World. He and his 12 children established such a strong genetic and cultural heritage that the many and scattered descendants are still obvious today.

Our narrator is one of them: Alexander MacDonald, the "gill beag ruadh" - little red boy - of the Clan Ruadh, distinctively red-haired and black-eyed, and grown now into comfortable, professional middle-age.

He's telling us the story of his family, in a voice that weaves in a rather disembodied way through time: back to that ancient ancestor (of whom he says, "sometimes it seems we know a lot about him, and at other times very little") and the struggles and trials of the Scots at Glencoe, at Culloden and through the clearances which provided the final, desperate reason for emigration.

Yet this is not a historical novel. If anything, these old histories serve to accentuate the currency of the past in the present, and they are told and argued over by today's clan members - still, often, in Gaelic, like a private code for recognition and identity even in the late 20th century - with the same urgency as any modern tragedy.

But most of the book's drama takes place in the last few decades of the 20th century. The narrator's parents are swallowed up by the treacherous ice of March, leaving him, his 3-year-old twin sister and their much older brothers as orphans.

The twins are raised by their grandparents - kindly, loving, full of memory - while their older brothers fend for themselves in a house in the woods, living wildly with no thought to the future.

When tragedy strikes, no one is quite ready for it, although of course, looking back, it is easy to see how inevitable it was, how inexorable was the series of events that led to such wastage and loss.

This is not a story one wants to say too much about in a review. Read it, and experience the gentle, terrible unfolding of events that lead all the way back to the beginning of the book: to a sad, enslaved man, old before his time, living behind an anonymous doorway in a seedy part of town, tended only by a brother who loves him for all that he was.

MacLeod's is a powerful voice, full of beauty and with a rich range of emotions that sit not so much in the words that his characters speak, but in the pauses between the words, in the things that people do for and to each other.

The larger themes, of the migration of peoples and the changes and losses that always entails, add layers of wistfulness to the book's effect, so that, like a sad, lonely Celtic melody, the story will haunt you for days.

Vintage

$26.95

* Margie Thomson is an Auckland journalist.