At Christmas time a number of customers were looking for suggestions for presents. A fair few of them left with a copy of Alistair MacLeods collected stories, Island, in their bags and some with his one novel No Great Mischief. MacLeod has just died and his obituary in todays Guardian gave a flavour of the man and his work. MacLeod was a writer of the Scottish, Gaelic, diaspora and his stories and novel reach back to the origins of the community living in Cape Breton. He wrote as the Gaelic identity of that community was finally fading, the older people still keeping their native language, the younger moving away. But his writing was elegiac, poetic, addictive and - I know this from experience -sometimes hard to read out loud as the emotions just below the surface swell up, but also because many of his well-constructed sentences were long. Above all, his descriptions of the landscape are magical. Heres the opening of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, the title story of his first collection: Now in the early evening the sun is flashing everything in gold. It bathes the blunt grey rocks that loom yearningly out towards Europe and it touches upon the stunted spruce and the low-lying lichens and the delicate hardy ferns and the ganglia-rooted miss and the tiny tough rock cranberries. ... Everything before them and beneath them has been rapidly, briefly and thoroughly drenched and now the clear droplets catch and hold the suns infusion in a myriad of rainbow colours. ... Even further out, somewhere beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast; far away but still the nearest land, and closer now than is Toronto or Detroit... At the harbours entrance the small boys are jigging for the beautifully speckled salmon-pink sea trout. Barefootedly they stand on the tide-wet rocks, flicking their wrists and sending their glistening lines in shimmering golden arcs out into the rising tide. ... It is all of this I see now, standing at the final roads end of my twenty-five-hundred-mile journey. The road ends here - quite literally ends at the door of the now-abandoned fishing shanty some six brief yards in front of where I stand.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 19:19:37 +0000
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