A family's fascination with its own past is both all and part of Alistair MacLeod's candid oral history, No Great Mischief, which should be the strongest contender for this year's forthcoming Booker Prize . "It's about knowing a lot about your history and knowing some of it. It's also about the fact that once you know something, you can't unknow it": with MacLeod everything is practical and direct, said with a smile and a hearty laugh.
No Great Mischief, a family story of stories within stories is probably one of the finest novels you are likely to read and MacLeod, a Canadian of Scots ancestry, "but we've been in Canada for 200 years, my wife and I are both sixth generation ", is aware of it. "It (No Great Mischief) has been on the bestseller lists in Canada for 48 weeks and the book of stories has been on it for 18." Small wonder he looks happy. MacLeod, the most self-possessed of men, is as friendly as they come and shrewd with it.
Revered by a small but elite readership of international writers as well as readers, MacLeod likes pointing out that his reputation to date rests on the existence of 16 stories; two collections, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun. Not a huge body of work by any standards, yet every story is touched with the beauty and truth of genius, and a raw, earthy, all knowing genius at that. That current tally of stories - and now the novel - represents all his work. This man has never received a rejection slip. For him, there was no apprenticeship. "Well, I started later than others, I waited until I knew what I wanted to do." He is a craftsman who takes a fact, a happening, a nuance and shapes a story about it. "I only write when I have something to say, and I have something to say."
No Great Mischief has been a long time in the making, 13 years, a long time to most writers, an eternity in the present trend of conveyer-belt fiction writing. MacLeod at 64 is a red-faced, stout, smiling father of six with a face from a John McGahern story and a flat-footed, plodding walk. Walking towards Arrivals in Edinburgh Airport, early on a Sunday morning, he could as easily be the local publican as the career academic he is and has been for 30 years. Less reserved than Canadians tend to be on first meeting, he is quite American in demeanour and points out, "I studied there". MacLeod enjoys making fun about the lengthy gestation of his first novel. "People criticise Joyce Carol Oates for being too prolific, they make fun of me for being too slow." His editor and publisher, Doug Gibson, has been described as weary from repeated time-buying tactics on the lines of "almost ready . . ." and "nearly . . .": he's said to have finally made an exasperated raid on MacLeod's office and snatched the manuscript. MacLeod laughs, but quickly modifies the story - "it wasn't exactly like that. It's a generational story, it took time." It was also always going to be a novel. "I needed a novel to tell it in."
Late, or not, it is a miracle of a book, narrated by Alexander MacDonald, an orthodontist who was raised along with his twin sister by his grandparents after their parents died in the ice when the twins were three. Their 11-year-old brother also dies while their older brothers are left to fend for themselves. The opening of the book sees the dentist visit his now destitute older brother, Calum, for whom memory has become confused by drink and pain.
Calum's life has been destroyed by a chance event. These chance events are important in MacLeod's work. No Great Mis- chief is a cyclical, quasi historical narrative with three main time sequences, ever returning to the dominant image in which an earlier family patriarch, another Calum and head of the clann Calum Ruaidh, left Scotland in 1779 for Cape Breton, Canada. That crossing sets the scene for much of the physical hardship in a landscape of ice and water which follows. It also introduces one of the most powerful motifs not only in the novel but throughout MacLeod's work: dogs and horses. There is nothing Disney about his treatment, MacLeod is not a sentimentalist. These dogs are witnesses, passive observers who pay the penalty of loyalty just as the "collie-like " hero of the story "Winter Dog" dies by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some acquire a mythic status such as the original Calum Ruadh dog that plunged into the sea after her master's emigrant boat, her loyalty earning her place on board. Generations later, one of her descendants, the narrator's family dog, loses her life in defence of the family's right to man their lighthouse.
MacLeod says his approach is to appear to be setting out to tell a story rather than write it. "I want them to seem to be my story. I like to pretend that I'm an oral storyteller. Writing is a storytelling act." MacLeod's preferred voice is the first person, "although sometimes with a story like `Island' ", a powerful account of a woman's life devastated by a romantic encounter, "it could only have been told in the third person." Most of his stories share the voice of the novel: MacLeod is the storyteller.
"People think the stories are about me, that these things have happened to me, they seem very disappointed when I say, `no, it didn't happen to me, it's a story'. " Although he writes in the most natural of literary languages, deliberately avoiding effect, MacLeod's prose disturbs through the force of its description. It is this that gives it a timelessness as well as an historical texture. In "The Boat" the narrator recalls the day his father's lost body is finally retaken from the sea. "His hands were shredded ribbons as were his feet, which had lost their boots to the suction of the sea, and his shoulders came apart in our hands when we tried to move him from the rocks. And the fish had eaten his testicles and the gulls had pecked out his eyes and the green-white stubble of his whiskers had continued to grow in death, like the grass on graves, upon the purple, bloated mass that was his face." Many readers never forgot the horror of the description. "I often introduced my father to people and they would stare and say `but you're dead, you died at sea.' Sometimes they got quite annoyed." MacLeod laughs. "My father lived with my wife and myself. He died at Mass when I was 37." His mother died years earlier, he stabs at the exact year.
MacLeod does not see his characters as tragic heroes. "They are ordinary people in serious situations." Hardy is a presence but there are no obvious contemporary literary influences on MacLeod's work. History and family myth, as well as the multi-racial nature of Canada, have proved important sources. Or perhaps `'tone" would be a more accurate word than sources. MacLeod agrees Canadian writing is very strong and has asserted a sense of independence from its larger neighbour.
At the mention of Atwood, Munro, Ondaatje, Mavis Gallant, the late Robertson Davies and Timothy Findley he smiles and says, "yes and we are all very different". He does not elaborate. Nor does he express any views on contemporary US writers. "I don't talk about other writers" - except in the context of his work as professor of English at the University of Windsor, Ontario. His area is 19th English literature.
GROWING up in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, one of two children, MacLeod enjoyed a physical childhood and sport in the landscape he writes about. The landscape is another character in his work. Cape Breton remains home. "We go back every summer. I live in the house my great grandfather built. It's home." Fishing, mining and logging are all things he has done. Mining is a hazardous occupation, many of his characters have died or been scarred for life by it. Yet he also mythologises it, his miners are proud of their work as the narrator of "The Closing Down of Summer" realises, "I have always wished that my children could see me at my work . . . And that they might see how articulate we are in the accomplishment of what we do . . . in spite of the chill and the water and the dark and the danger, there is perhaps a certain eloquent beauty to be found in what we do."
For MacLeod, logging was far more dangerous. `'It really is terrifying." Having made the decision to go to university in the big city, he then went on to do post graduate studies at Notre Dame in the US. "I wrote my thesis on censorship in Thomas Hardy."
Should MacLeod suffer from artist torment, he conceals it well behind his hearty, chatty self. He likes his characters, even the young Vietnam draft dodger who arrives near the end of No Great Mischief to create havoc. MacLeod speaks freely about his novel, quoting it at length. But Hardy, the Brontes, Dickens also feature in his conversation. Of Dickens, he says, "he was of course, a great story teller, with great characters. But what I like most about him is his understanding of people". Having spent six years in the States, MacLeod returned to Canada and settled. His rare appearances at literary parties have at times had people saying, they thought he was dead. "I just say, `No, I went back to Canada. "
MacLeod also teaches creative writing. Time and again, he has been struck by students feeling they have to write about Big Places, "the cities, London, Paris, New York. I always say write about all places." Unlike many writers, MacLeod believes literature is regional. "All writing is regional. The Bible is regional." His academic career has given him a structure, while his writing has made his colleagues more supportive than envious. "They like me," he smiles slyly, "they think I have a soul."
No Great Mischiefby Alistair MacLeod has just been published by Jonathan Cape.