Island: The Collected Stories, 1968-2014 by Alistair MacLeod
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant have long overshadowed Alistair MacLeod, yet the resonance and aura of his short stories affirm him as a master of the genre. In Island: The Collected Stories 1968-20141 he demonstrates that mastery over several decades. Pared-down titles such as “Island,” “The Boat,” and “Vision” pinpoint the specifics of his short stories and contrast with their broader scope and implications for abandoned shanties and table rock. Parataxis and parallelisms from the Bible and Ernest Hemingway influence his parade of “and’s” that accumulate in rhythms of the sea surrounding his island on Canada’s east coast, and the flow of salt across Cape Breton.
“The Boat” (1968) stamps the cadence of past and present in male and female perspectives and tidal rhythms. Local routine breaks and is broken: “There are times even now, when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth.” This workaday night intrudes on narrative dreams and nightmares in a steadfast masculine world where ink composes salt, and books vie with boats. The parallelism of the second sentence affirms and affixes this dreamlike sequence in the opening paragraph: “There are times when I am half out of bed and fumbling for socks and mumbling for words before I realize that I am foolishly alone, that no one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters by the peer.” The timelessness of four in the morning weaves between waking and working, domestic detail and exterior water. And’s lap fumbling and mumbling, no one and no boat whose actions are caught in words.
“The Boat” rides restlessly in waters and on shore, as the next paragraph turns more ominous: “At such times only the grey corpses on the overflowing ashtray beside my bed bear witness to the extinction of the latest spark and silently await the crushing out of the most recent of their fellows.” Like boats and other containers in the story, this ashtray overflows with meaning, for these grey corpses prepare for his father’s death at the end of the story. “But neither is it easy to know that your father was found on November twenty-eighth, ten miles to the north and wedged between two boulders at the base of the rock-strewn cliffs where he had been hurled and slammed so many times.” These times echo the opening times, and the ashes surface as shreds upon the water of a deterministic naturalism that snuffs out lives: “His hands were shredded ribbons, as were his feet which had lost their boots to the suction of the sea.” His feet and boots are part of his son’s first memories of gigantic rubber boots smelling of salt: “I remember the sound of his rubber boots galumphing along the gravel beach.” These same fateful sounds travel from life to death.
The narrator engages with his companions who “in such places at such times make uninteresting little protective chit-chat until the dawn reluctantly arrives.” “The Boat” hovers in a twilight zone and no man’s land of mesmerizing atmosphere and concrete seascape; it is a vessel of salt, fish, and flesh. “The floor of the boat was permeated with the same odour and in its constancy I was not aware of change.” When he returns to his house everyone questions him: “They repeated ‘the boat’ at the end of all their questions.” Once again, the boat’s repetitions hypnotize character and reader through routine. The narrator shifts perspective to his mother, as the boat becomes a lure between genders and generations. “She seemed to be always repairing clothes that were ‘torn in the boat’ or looking for ‘the boat’ through our kitchen window.” Almost human, it suffers from the wear and tear of experience, and is called “Jenny Lynn.” “Jenny Lynn had been my mother’s maiden name and the boat was called after her as another link in the chain of tradition.” Bobbing on the waves, it is a metronome of time, distance, and rhythm. “I say this now as if I knew it all then…. But of course it was not that way at all, for I learned it all very slowly and there was not time enough.” Hence the distortions of Proustian nostalgia and remembrance of lost time and the lost salt gift of blood.
Similarly, the house is divided between Apollonian mother and Dionysiac father. MacLeod details the dimensions and design of each room. “The kitchen was shared by all of us and was a buffer zone between the immaculate order of ten other rooms and the disruptive chaos of the single room that was my father’s.” Thanks to his mother, everything is “clean and spotless and in order,” which is balanced by her own appearance – “tall and dark and powerfully energetic.” She reminds her son of Thomas Hardy’s women, the first in a number of literary allusions in this story that suggests Hardy’s regional determinism. Yet she has no use for books, unlike her husband who is an avid reader and who collects magazines, books, and grey flecks of cigarette ash in his disordered room. These cigarettes “had tumbled from the ashtray unnoticed and branded their statements permanently and quietly into the wood until the odour of their burning caused the snuffing out of their lives.” In the metonymy of MacLeod’s prose, smoker and cigarette meet the same fate.
His father takes tourists from Boston in his boat, then drinks and sings sea shanties which embarrass his son. “I was just approaching the wharf to deliver my mother’s message when he began, and the familiar yet unfamiliar voice that rolled down from the cabin made me feel as I had never felt before, or perhaps as I had always felt without really knowing it, and I was ashamed yet proud, young yet old and saved yet forever lost, and there was nothing I could do to control my legs which trembled nor my eyes which wept, for what they could not tell.” His epiphany contains conflicted emotions told in coordinated conjunctions – the and’s of overwhelming emotions. The American tourists send his father a photograph “To Our Ernest Hemingway.” Along with the water imagery of Tennyson, the fiction of Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, and Hardy, and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hemingway’s syntax enters “The Boat”: “There were few storms and we were out almost every day and we lost a minimum of gear and seemed to land a maximum of fish and I tanned dark and brown after the manner of my uncles.”
All of those and’s rush and gather towards the father’s climactic drowning at sea on November twenty-first, but his body not recovered until a week later. “And you know that it is useless…. And you know also, the final irony, that your father, like your uncles and all the men that form your past, cannot swim a stroke.” On these fishing grounds many have lost their lives – “others before and before and before.” Within those before times there is the Gaelic language and identity that accompanies MacLeod’s Atlantic gothic in the dismemberment of his father’s orphic and Dionysiac corpse: “There was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair.” And Tennyson in the water.
“Vision” (1986) reprises that Atlantic gothic atmosphere which appears in the unreliability of its opening sentence and mythical circumstances surrounding blind vision. “I don’t remember when I had heard the story but I remember the first time that I had heard it and remembered it.” Many of the inhabitants of these stories within stories are named Angus or Alex, and they fish in seasonal cycles for lobster, mackerel, and trouble. “Vision” focusses on twins as if they were representative of double perception. Twinning has additional ramifications: “This has been the telling of a story about a story but like most stories it has spun off into others and relied on others and perhaps no story ever really stands alone.” Tall tales fit into short stories of families with “children of uncertainty,” offspring of the unknown: “Difficult ever to be certain in our judgements or to fully see or understand. Difficult then to see and understand the twisted strands within the rope. And forever difficult to see and understand the tangled twisted strands of love.” The bifocal vision of twin narrators oversees the sea and transforms Cape Breton’s history.
The eponymous “Island” (1988) features an almost unnamed female protagonist (Agnes turned Angus) who lives in relative isolation with her parents who operate the island’s lighthouse. Pathetic fallacy in the form of a grim rain opens the story with Thomas Hardy looking over MacLeod’s shoulder: “Sometimes it slanted against the window with a pinging sound, which meant it was close to hail, and then it was visible as tiny pellets for a moment on the pane before the pellets vanished and rolled quietly down the glass, each drop leaving its own delicate trickle.” The fire within the stove offsets the outer elements, even as the island interacts with the mainland. The “greyness of the ashpan” in the stove colours the atmosphere inside and out, and the mood appears as “coffins.” In such isolation, the characters on the island speak to ghosts. When the minimalist protagonist is seventeen a blue-eyed, red-headed stranger fishing for lobster meets her and they make love. MacLeod prepares for their pent-up passion by interjecting the behaviour of “stifled rams,” “trussed feet,” and matching gesture of the protagonist who “wrapped the damp dish cloth towel around her hand as if it were a bandage and then she as quickly unwrapped it again.” Bondage and bandage are repeated exactly near the end of the story to link the lines of lust, fate, and looping of the boat’s rope. With his promise to return he leaves her pregnant and is killed in an accident. The narrator serves as a kind of lighthouse keeper shining fading beams on events: “The wind shifted and blew from inconsistent directions.” Inconsistent directions permeate the story and characters’ fates in and out of the region. The “keeper of the light” maintains tradition against the island’s determinism: “She settled into the life with a sort of wilful determination tempered by the fact that she was still waiting for something to happen and to bring about the change.”
MacLeod fast forwards two years on a hot summer afternoon when she sees another boat approaching. She has been restless all day, so she walks to the edge of the island “as if testing the boundaries, somewhat as a restless animal might explore the limits of its cage.” Her restlessness barely conceals the sexual urges of Agnes-Angus, a lamb-cattle hybrid. “It was as if she were walking through the masculine remnants of an abandoned and vanished civilization.” Her animal nature matches her dogs “panting in the summer heat and drops of water fell from the extended redness of their tongues.” In seasonal rhythms, these hot drops contrast with the cold, grey drops at the beginning of the story. She hangs her wet coveralls on the clothesline: “Their dangling legs rasped together with the gentlest of frictions…. Droplets dripped from them onto the summer grass.” This friction is the foreplay of fiction prior to her sexual encounter with four men in a boat fishing for mackerel which are “floating islands.” The frenzy of the fish transfers to the fishermen in intermingled blood. “At first they seemed driven by the frenzy of all that had happened…. The clothes of the men were sprinkled with blackening clots of blood and the golden spawn of the female fish and the milky white semen of the male.” In the island’s ecosystem there is an interchange between men and mackerel. “She had never seen fully aroused men before, having known only one man at one time, and having experienced in that damp darkness more of feeling than of sight.”
Their sexual episode is barely contained in one paragraph that begins with one of the fishermen. “She was to remember for the rest of her life, the oldest man with the white hair,” as he pulls his jersey over his shoulders and folds it neatly on the rock beside her. The paragraph ends with a kind of domestic, comic distance beyond the immediacy of the island. “It was as if he were doing it out of long habit and was preparing to lie down with his wife. She almost expected him to brush his teeth.” In its matter-of-fact manner, the story’s climax is anti-climactic, receding with time: “After the first frenzy they were quieter.” The protagonist’s dogs watch these goings-on, and later she thinks “how often she had watched them in the fury of their own mating.” Her dogs mediate between mackerel and human beings, as frenzy and fury turn to flashes of insight: “She knew in one of those intuitive flashes that they would never say anything to anyone.” She is certain that she will become pregnant after this prolonged encounter. She touches her body: “It was sticky with blood and fishspawn and human seed.” After all these exchanges and transfers she does not become pregnant.
As the years pass, she passes into folklore as “the mad woman on the island.” Eventually she has to abandon the shanties on the island with her affirmative refrain of “Oh yes,” as if she were part of a Cape Breton ballad. The narrator offers a parting glance at the emptied island: “A dog barked once. And when the light revolved, its solitary beam found no MacPhedrans on the island or the sea.” MacLeod is a Prospero creating and quelling Atlantic tempests in gothic and Gaelic modes. His lighthouse of fiction casts beams across a dark vastness and cycles of seasons where no man or woman is an island.
About the Author
ALISTAIR MacLEOD (1936-2014), raised in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, was an acclaimed Canadian novelist, short story writer, and academic.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : McClelland & Stewart
Publication date : July 15 2025
Language : English
Print length : 416 pages
ISBN-10 : 077102357X
ISBN-13 : 978-0771023576
Part of the inaugural Kanata Classics list, with a new introduction by Kate Beaton.