Hope Planted in a Barren Landscape

“The land was ours,” wrote the poet Robert Frost, “before we were the land’s,” but his vision, steeped in a moment of nationalism, brooked neither the pain of possession nor the ambivalence of belonging. One thousand miles north of Frost’s granite and birch-covered landscapes, the terrains of Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod are more barren and wind-swept. Tenure, forged in duty and obligation, is less to be desired than endured.

“Island,” 16 short stories following the publication last year of MacLeod’s much-acclaimed novel “No Great Mischief,” is a remarkable collection. Like the great writer W.G. Sebald, MacLeod wanders across the landscape he claims as his own and lets the wandering reveal its meaning, content to know that the deeper you pour yourself into a region, the more you transcend the particulars and give the stories a universal sheen, an intimate gloss.

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How could it be otherwise? Perched on the eastern rim of Canada, within the fractured archipelago of the St. Lawrence River, neither part of the continent nor removed from it, MacLeod’s Americans--refugees from Ireland’s poverty and Scotland’s clearances--are haunted by what’s been lost, by what can never be.

They cleared the forests and opened the fields. They took to the sea. They endured the summer heat and the winter cold, the storms that swept across the sounds, the blizzards that tore the nights asunder.

Settling into life with a “willful determination,” they knew that if they waited, their lives would change, and it is change that MacLeod captures best. He sings his stories, and in the cadences of his sentences, in the slow unraveling of the narrative, his quiet deliberation, he steps between generations, setting down their history, their silent progressions, before they are lost. Read his words out loud. Read them twice over. Understand that nothing happens within these pages that isn’t the product of time.

Sons and daughters have left for the cities. Songs have lost their meaning. Settlements slowly are disappearing. Choices sit like dynamite in bedrock, between necessity and memory, practicality and sentiment. In “The Boat,” a son watches his mother trap his father--a man who has lost his will to work the sea--slowly and steadily beneath the weight of tradition and expectation.

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In “The Vastness of the Dark,” a young man escapes his family’s fate, a life in the mines that run beneath the sea, to discover after hitchhiking not far away “that the older people of my past are more complicated than perhaps I had ever thought. . . . Their lives flowing into mine and mine out from theirs.”

“Island” spans nearly 30 years, and the earliest stories, written in the late 1960s, betray neither youthfulness nor immaturity. Although MacLeod is writing about youth, his vision is never reckless: Is it possible, he wants to know, to be yourself without betraying your family?

“We just can’t live in a clan system any more,” a son pleads with his mother. “We have to see beyond ourselves and our families. We have to live in the twentieth century.”

“Twentieth century?” she replies. “What is the twentieth century to me if I cannot have my own?”

Only she has no choice. Alcoholism, suicide and faraway cities have claimed her children. Coal dust spots lungs. Capsizings keep boats from returning home. The only work is to chop down the forests at a time when a government with more faith in tourism than in farming and fishing tries to make the land a preserve. So folklorists visit and record the vanishing life; hardship is now picturesque.

“Sometimes when seeing the end of our present,” one character thinks, “our past looms ever larger, because it is all we have or think we know. I feel myself falling back into the past now, hoping to have more and more past as I have less and less future.”

When a young man visits his 96-year-old grandmother, he hopes that he “might find a way of understanding and of coming to terms with death; yet deep down I know that I will find only the intensity of life.”

More than living, more than dying, the intensity of life is all that there is. It creates the momentum for one of the more remarkable stories, “The Closing Down of Summer,” a prose poem of reminiscences by a miner who, with his crew, is drawing out the final days of summer on a Nova Scotia beach before flying to a new job in South Africa.

It is a triumph of detail slowly spilled over the pages. One moment MacLeod describes the men as they exchange moonshine for mackerel and roast the fish on driftwood fires; in the next the focus expands to death and love and the loneliness in between.

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MacLeod’s deepening sense of the world and of the people whose lives he is responsible for gives each scene its bittersweet poignancy. The title story tells of the MacPhedran family who runs the government lighthouse and whose daughter studies the mainland from a distance and accommodates herself to the isolation.

“She was defensive, like most of her family, on the subject of the island. Knowing that they were often regarded as slightly eccentric because of how and where they lived. Always anticipating questions about the island’s loneliness.”

“Some people are lonely no matter where they are,” her boyfriend tells her. Only he leaves and never returns, and she is left with his memory and the child he gave her. It is a moment that sees her through the death of her parents and into her lone custodianship of the light.

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In “The Tuning of Perfection,” a old man takes solace in the songs his wife, dead almost 50 years, sings to him in his dreams. “Every note was perfect, as perfect and clear as the waiting water droplets hanging on the fragile leaf or the high suspended eagle outlined against the sky at the apex of its arc.”

No less for the writings of Alistair MacLeod. No less for the solace of his prose.