Chan Fhiach Buille (A Review of Alistair MacLeod’s “No Great Mischief”)
“No Great Mischief” is the first novel by Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod, and if you believe the jacket of the novel you will indulge in the assertion that MacLeod is “the greatest living Canadian author” and that the novel is “one of the best Canadian novels”, but if you read the novel it may be hard to reach either conclusion on your own unless you have a low opinion of Canadian literature on the whole.
In this novel MacLeod presents a family history, indulging in a genealogical survey of the “Clann Chalum Ruaidh”, a name which if you have a hard time remembering at first, you won’t by the novels end since the author manages to mention the familial clan name at least once on every page of the novel. Though history is a major component of the novel, the narrator is a 20th century man who was raised with his twin sister by his paternal grandparents after his own parents (and one sibling) drowned in a tragic accident, while his older brothers were left to raise themselves upon some family property. The novel spirals out from that tragic event to the future and past, cataloguing the family’s journey through the new world, as well as the life of a 20th century mining family, but as interesting as this may sound on paper, the execution leaves much to be desired.
The novel is epic in its presentation in that it falls upon certain choruses through out the work, not the typical choruses, and not the verses of Gaelic song it indulges in, but rather in certain aspects of its plot, which are repeated again and again. The mention of the dog that swims out onto the sea to remain with its master for example, or the wife that died on sea, or battle that took place on the Scottish Highlands. Indeed, these pieces of the narrative crop up again and again, not unlike the choruses of the traditional epic, so much so that the 283 page novel could have been cut to about a 150 pages should the author chose to have limited the number of times the reader had to be reminded that three different Alexander McDonalds worked in the mines, or that the novel’s narrator is also called “’ille bhig ruaidh”. The employment of a chorus can be effective, but in this particular work it seems more like a tool used by an author who is trying to stretch a short story into a novel and is annoying to at least one reader!
In its presentation of the family, MacLeod’s novel romanticises the narrator’s genealogy, painting a picture of a family where there is not one mention of infidelity, not one mention of abuse, and not one hateful or morally corrupt bone in a single body, outside of the love of drinking which is always presented as a well earned vice that occurs only as a reward for an over burdened and often exploited working class family with a ridiculously storng work ethic. The narrator’s family are all hard working, honest, understanding, supportive and loving and the only real sin that occurs in the novel is during an act of self-defence and it of course is punished, tragically, to the fullest extent of the law (a laughable second-degree murder conviction that would have never gotten more than an involuntary manslaughter conviction, and likely would have been excused altogether considering the fact that the perpetrator was being choked to death during the altercation). This romanticised genealogy makes the family unrelatable and detestably perfect, and also indulges in a sort of dangerous nationalistic/clan mentality that is backed up by unbelievable accounts within the narrative (such as the instance when, five provinces away from their home, a car pulls over to ask a kid, based on the fact of his red-headedness, what his mothers maiden name was, and then is rewarded with a fifty dollar bill that is to be sent home to his mother with a greeting from distant descendants of the familial clan). This sub-culture indulgence in nationalistic tendency doesn’t offer any negatives, outside of a fight that culminates between a members of the “Clann Chalum Ruaidh” and some French miners, which of course is initiated by the French and leaves no implication that the nationalistic tendencies of the “Clann Chalum Ruaidh” is flawed, but rather that nationalistic tendencies of the French are, since they are the ones who initiated the conflict.
These romantic presentations are not limited to the “Clann Chalum Ruaidh”, but are also extended to the migrant workers who populate the fields of south-western Ontario each year, as MacLeod presents, what I’m sure to him, is a sympathetic and romantic portrayal of the working-class, migrant workers. The problem is that any time such sympathetic portrayals are offered, they are often implicitly insulting and suggest a simplicity in a people that makes broad stroke generalizations about them. In MacLeod’s novel these undermining sweeping broad strokes and then exploited further as a means to undermine other classes as MacLeod juxtaposes them next to middle and ruling-class people who go strawberry picking in neighbouring fields for their own amusement, and MacLeod’s picture of these people is one that suggests a great deal of laziness and a lack of the work ethic which he himself praises in his own people through the novel’s narrator. Both the illustration of the migrant workers and middle/ruling classes are simple, romanticised, insulting clichés which reaffirm the moral superiority of the “Clann Chalum Ruaidh” and suggest that such dangerously demeaning generalizations of people are romantic. In the context of the novel such presentations seem almost as way to expunge or exercise some sort of warped, class-conscious guilt that both the novel’s narrator and its author feel for not having chained themselves to the working class destiny of the “Clann Chalum Ruaidh”.
Coupled with these problematic issues is the author’s incorporation of Gaelic throughout the novel. In novels where different cultures co-exist, it is often an effective tool to incorporate foreign languages into the text, but the manner in which MacLeod does it seems ineffective. After each passage that appears in Gaelic, the author goes on to translate, either directly by repeating the passage in English, or indirectly by having a character repeat the phrase in English (as if their own Gaelic speaking audience would need an English translation). In instances where there are multiple languages being employed, incorporating the foreign language without translation challenges the reader and demands that they reach out to “the other” in an attempt to better understand, and places the reader very much in the position of the characters, who like the reader often have no immediate means of translating languages that are foreign to them. MacLeod though makes it too easy for the reader by constantly offering translations and doesn’t allow the reader to feel the powerlessness that can occur in such situations and in turn sanitizes the potentially challenging experience and walks the reader through as if they were children incapable of handling the situation. If an author is going to simply translate a foreign dialect or language immediately after it appears in the work, then there is little reason to even have written in the foreign dialect or language to start with.
As for character, there seems to be a lack of depth there as well. The characters often seem to speak in the same voice to each other, with characters often randomly floating out, what I think is supposed to be profound, assessments regarding life, or informing each other of certain histories which appear so often in the novel that it is unbelievable that any character in the novel would find any of the historical anecdotes to be news pass the age of ten, though that doesn’t stop brothers and sisters who are in their 40’s or 50’s from repeating to each other these same, tired historical accounts again and again, and acting as if they were news each time. Such accounts or meditations on life are always presented with the same tone, the same voice, and are never received as random, or clichéd, or melodramatic, or self-indulgent, though 50 pages into novel that is what they seem very much to be. Many times through out the novel the voices seem almost too academic, at one point the narrator, in speaking to a dialogue between him and his siblings refers to his brothers, not by name, but rather by number, saying: my first brother, and; my second brother, where it would seem normal (and certainly more natural) to refer to them by name. Such academic voices crop up throughout the novel as various characters feel the need to outline the various, aforementioned, histories.
Overall, the novel seems to be an imitation of the works laid out by the likes of Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. MacLeod paints a picture of the working class, and like the aforementioned America writers, romanticises the life experience of the working class, but unlike these authors, he seems to fail to realize how dangerous and insulting such broad stroked generalizations are. Other authors are careful to paint diverse pictures, not only of groups, but of individuals as well, often suggesting not only a duality, but a multiplicity of peoples and persons that is not present in the tragically, one-dimensional, romanticized occupants of MacLeod’s novel, and even the description of the life of a miner was surprisingly vague and void in small details, a shock considering the fact that MacLeod actually worked as a miner in his youth. Writers like McCarthy, Faulkner and Steinbeck often create vivid pictures of the of various working class people, building up the experience of certain occupations with a what seems like a casual and at the same time comprehensive understanding of the various occupations that appear in their respective works, but MacLeod, who himself worked as a miner and as a fisherman, seems to offer little in the way of such details in his own work. Overall the piece seems like an over romanticised genealogical overview that indulges in a dangerous nationalistic views and generalizations, and while the prose itself is well structured (albeit formulaic), and MacLeod would certainly earn top marks for composition in a high-school class, the content is troublesome and makes the work impossible to enjoy.