Category: Fiction Reviews

Island: The Complete Stories, by Alistair MacLeod

The words of the narrator in “The Closing Down of Summer”:

“[I]n the introduction to the literature text that my eldest daughter brings home from university it states that ‘the private experience, if articulated with skill, may communicate an appeal that is universal beyond the limitations of time or landscape.’ I have read that over several times and thought about its meaning in relation to myself. . . . I would like somehow to show and tell the nature of my work and perhaps some of my entombed feelings to those that I would love, if they would care to listen.”

And what follows is the narrator’s explanation of leaving university and the reading of literature to embrace the life of a deep shaft miner, traveling the world, abandoning his family at the end of each summer in a caravan of big cars full of large, strong, brave men, and going to places like Haiti, Chile, the Congo. Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico, Jamaica. Drinking moonshine as they drive non-stop, hard through the night.

MacLeod is brilliant in showing and telling the nature of their dangerous work and the fullness of their hearts in their isolation from the rest of the world. We can feel their physicality and courage. We can know them.

Like the narrator in “The Closing Down of Summer,” MacLeod wants us to understand and care and know about his corner of the world, his people, his roots. So he writes about the people who came to Cape Breton as part of The Clearances (the forced migration of people from the Highlands and western islands of Scotland in the mid-to-late 18th Century). Most of his stories are set on Cape Breton, where the old Gaelic language, music, and myths are still part of life.

MacLeod uses his amazing skills as a describer to make us feel how beautiful and compelling, but inhospitable and dangerous, Cape Breton is. How proud people are to be miners, fishermen, and farmers. How arduous such work is on the body and spirit. What pride the people take in their work.

There are sixteen stories in Island, the first published when MacLeod was thirty-one, the last when he was sixty-three. And the tenor of the stories, as they progress from 1968 to 1999 generally embrace the aging of the human spirit and psyche.

Characters in the earlier stories are more innocent and aspirational (boys like Jesse in “The Golden Gift of Grey” who drifts into the pool hall, and like James in “The Vastness of the Dark” who believes leaving home will be simple).  With the middle stories like “The Closing Down of Summer,” narrators are in their prime, but mindful of the cycle of life. And with the last stories like “Vision,” “Island,” and “Clearances,” there’s disillusion, madness, German tourists, and pit bulls.

Stories are populated by children, young people, men, women, old people–and, of almost equal importance, by cattle, horses, sheep, dogs, and chickens.  The breeding of people and the breeding of animals is serious business in this world.

Most of the stories have a male narrator – thus the collection overall has a masculine perspective. In many ways, the stories are a study of masculinity. But we see women. And they are strong. The fierce mother in “The Boat” and the woman with the coral combs in “In the Fall.” The resolute grandmother in “The Road to Rankin’s Point.” The brave, lonely, ultimately mad woman in “Island.”

The skill of MacLeod’s writing makes Cape Breton and its people real. We know them. And by knowing them, we know ourselves. We know that life is ultimately a story of loss, but that loss can be faced with kinship, love, and courage.

My favorite anecdote about MacLeod is that when a writing student asked him how long a good story should be, MacLeod answered, “Just make your story as long as a piece of string, and it will work out just fine.”

And it does.

—Sharelle Moranville

Beloved by Toni Morrison

 

Toni Morrison says she intended her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Beloved to be disorienting. And she succeeded.  She throws readers into the internal chaos faced by former slaves, who live in a constant state of grief, anxiety, and determination. This book is the ultimate definition of showing rather than telling. As we read, our minds try to make sense of a story that is non-linear to the extreme, that is usually unclear and unexplained. But Morrison wants us to experience, at least to a small degree, what it felt like to be a slave.

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another,” says the main character, Sethe, late in the book.

The details of what happens in the book can be difficult to determine empirically, especially for people who want all the pieces of a puzzle to fit. In Beloved, Morrison leaves us with pieces we have to imagine ourselves. This is a sensual book, not a logical one.

The story begins with Sethe living at 124 Bluestone Road, on the outskirts of Cincinnati. She’d escaped the Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky with her two boys and the baby she was still nursing. She’d sent her children ahead and had a fourth baby on her way to Ohio, helped by a young white woman named Amy Denver; she named the baby Denver, after the mysterious woman.  With the help of another former slave, Stamp Paid, she made it to 124, where her mother-in-law Baby Suggs lived as a free woman, bought by her son Halle, Sethe’s husband.

Sethe has a month of freedom before Schoolteacher, who took over Sweet Home, finds her. In terror and rage, she kills her baby to keep her from slavery, slitting the child’s throat. She is briefly jailed and then returns to 124, which is now overcome with the spirit of the dead baby. She has only enough money for the word “Beloved” to be placed on the baby’s gravestone–not enough to add “Dearly.”

The first line gives a solid clue about where we’re going: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”

The house is a character in this complex work, a haven, a protector, but also a prison and a keeper of secrets. Baby Suggs has since died and Sethe and teenage Denver live in the house alone. The two boys have run away, pushed out by the house’s violent spirit. Sethe works in town, cooking at a restaurant.

Paul D., who was a slave at Sweet Home with Sethe, shows up early on. He feels the mood of the house and calls it evil. “Not evil, “Sethe says, “Just sad.” Denver disagrees, saying the ghost “is not evil, but not sad either.” What is it? “Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked,” Denver says.

Paul D. may or may not be the catalyst for the arrival of a young woman who calls herself Beloved, who emerges out of the river shortly after Paul D. shows up. It’s more than 20 years since Sethe escaped the plantation, where, as slaves, both faced horrors neither can forget, or live with.

Who is Beloved? Is she actually the spirit of Sethe’s murdered child, come back to seek revenge? The clues are there—she’s the right age, she speaks with a raspy voice because she had died of a slit throat, her feet are like a baby’s, and she behaves like a toddler—an angry, spiteful one.

To Sethe and Denver, who have lived with Beloved’s ghost, it’s a given that the young woman who showed up on their porch one summer day is the baby who died in the shed behind their house.

But to Paul D., Beloved is a threat to his happiness with Sethe, whom he has loved for decades.  And she’s a vestige of what he left behind. But Sethe’s strong feelings worry him. It’s not safe:

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.”  

Beloved’s control over Sethe builds until it nearly kills her. Denver, originally under Beloved’s spell, sees her as a danger and an aberration and finally leaves the house and goes to town, seeking help. She finds a community to support her, especially the women who come to 124, singing and praying in an attempt to rid 124 of the ghost. When the women see Beloved, they “surprise themselves by feeling no fear.” Mr. Bodwin, basically a good guy and protector of slaves, drives up. But he’s white, and Sethe thinks he’s coming after her “best thing,” her child, Beloved. This sets her into another rage. This time, Denver and the women constrain her.

Beloved disappears and a boy says he saw a woman walking into the river with fish for hair. Are we to make sense of this? We can try, but whatever it means, Beloved is gone.

Later, Sethe tells Paul D. that Beloved was her “best thing.”

“No,” Paul D. replies. “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.”

— Pat Prijatel

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, by Sharyn McCrumb

The Hangman is a rock formation in Wake County, a rural community in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. In this charming natural setting, Sharyn McCrumb creates the second book in her Appalachian ballad series, a mystery surrounding the murder of four members of one rural family. She introduces us to a loose-knit community of independent yet interdependent locals who live along a carcinogenic river full of toxins from a paper plant and in hills once covered by chestnut trees that were all killed by a blight decades before.

This is a story about humans and nature, trials and resilience, destruction and resurrection, change and adaptation.

But who is the Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter?
Could it be Nora Bonesteel, the woman who lives on the top of Ashe Mountain, who knows her neighbors’ news before they do because she has The Sight? No, not Nora. She is an incomparable character, but the description “beautiful daughter” falls a little short of incapsulating her rare personality and her inimitable power.

Or maybe it’s Laura Bruce, who ends up taking over her husband’s ministerial duties when he is sent to the Gulf War? No, she is a bit of an angel of mercy, rescuing kids of all ages from floods and fires and human suffering. But, again, “beautiful daughter” doesn\’t capture her. She’s more the mother.

How about Maggie Underhill, one of the two surviving children of the slain family? No, Maggie is an important character, but not a main force in the book. Sadly, like her mother, she tends to be a follower until, at the end, her life depends on forging her own way.

None of these women feels right as the Hangman’s child. If not them, though, who?

The clue to that puzzle is in McCrumb’s love of folklore and folk music, which she weaves throughout this and her other ballad novels, and in the music of a band that shares her Scottish roots. In 1967, 25 years before this book was published, the Incredible String Band, self-described as a “Scottish psychedelic folk group,” released an album titled Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. At the time, singer Mike Heron explained the title: “The hangman is death and the beautiful daughter is what comes after.”

Death does permeate this novel, yet the book ends up being about life. About what comes after. This is not a grim read, but a loving, hopeful one.

McCrumb introduces bits of history and geography that add depth and intrigue to her tale. She explains that, while people in the nearby cities fought on the Confederate side during the Civil War, those in the mountains supported the Union. They had their land, their sustenance, and they wanted to keep it and to be left alone. Yet they got embroiled in the war and in what came after.

As a side story, McCrumb introduces Tavy and Taw, childhood friends, now retired, who are embroiled in a fight with the paper mill. Tavy has been diagnosed with incurable cancer that the doctor ties to the toxic river on which he has spent his life fishing. Turns out the Tavy and Taw are also the names of two rivers in Cornwall, which some locals say are enchanted.

Plus there’s Laura’s baby and Nora’s prediction and the sheriff’s fixation on Naomi Judd and her retirement from music because of hepatitis. In the end, the community pulls together, survivors helping survivors. Thanks to the generosity of his dispatcher, the sheriff sits in bliss watching Naomi in concert.

The book was written in 1992 and the themes of environmental degradation have only gotten worse. But Sheriff Arrowood would be happy to know that Naomi has gotten much better.

— Pat Prijatel, with thanks to Jeanie Smith for asking the original question, “Who is the hangman’s beautiful daughter?” and to Annie Waskom for her research on 1960s psychedelic folk bands and rivers in Cornwall.