The men in these stories die young in the course of everyday work, or they live as witnesses to their friends' gruesome deaths. Settlers from northern Scotland arrived in Cape Breton with a heritage of oral stories, and they found a country in which isolation, poverty and climate conspired to add to their repertoire. MacLeod's cadences and emotional register are in the dark tradition of highland folk tales.
These stories may be set largely in the past, but what makes them extraordinary is their sense of immediacy, their evocation of what it means to be alive in a human skin. Most often the narrators are men casting their gaze back through time, remembering - for those of us who move between dusty car parks and air-conditioned office towers - what life on the sea or in barns or mine shafts is like, recalling in long, fluid passages how animals are bred and slaughtered, how nets are laid, how graves are dug. Island, 1988), all the stories are about men. And, as though MacLeod's gifts as a writer fed off the vitality of his subject, the earlier stories are the most powerful in the later stories there's the sense, perhaps inevitable, that what was an urgent outpouring has become a more deliberate craft and a more conscious exploration of theme. No Great Mischief, his publishers have decided to issue all his short fiction in a matching volume.Īs Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986), as well as a new story,Ĭlearances, written for CBC's Festival of Fiction in 1999.Ĭollectively, the stories are an elegy to a way of life that is gone. In the wake of MacLeod's acclaimed 1999 novel
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