Few critics will be disputing the result of the sixth International Impac Dublin Literary Award which has been won by one of the world's finest exponents of the art of story-telling.
Canada's Alistair MacLeod was yesterday announced as the winner for his beautiful, elegaic first novel, No Great Mischief. Strongly tipped by many to win last year's Booker Prize, it failed even to make the short list.
MacLeod (65) was told about his £100,000 win when a member of the judging panel phoned him in Canada from Dublin Castle. It is unlikely that the retired academic, whose international fame had rested before the publication of No Great Mischief on a small though magnificent body of short stories - in two collections, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun - will be overcome by the news.
MacLeod, whose family arrived in Canada from Scotland more than 200 years ago, is a calmly hearty, friendly character as able to tell a good story in conversation as he is on the page. He is unusually self-possessed and has a strong if understated confidence in his work.
No Great Mischief took 13 years to write. As MacLeod told me in an early morning interview last year in Edinburgh, "it's a generational story, it took time". Despite its long gestation, the novel was brilliantly received by his readers, among whom are included some of the best writers in the world. MacLeod creates the close domestic tensions of families and communities with a sureness shared by John McGahern.
In the novel, which consists of layers of family history within stories told with all the colour, grace and texture of oral story telling, MacLeod chronicles the struggles of the MacDonald clan. Alexander, an orthodonist, is the narrator. Raised along with his twin sister by his grandparents after their parents die in the ice, the twins are the two who appear to have thrived. The accident which claimed their parents also saw the death of their 11-year-old brother.
In the present-day episodes, Alexander visits his destitute elder brother, Calum, now an alcoholic, whose notion of memory has become confused by drink, pain and his shame. MacLeod is good on evoking the grief and helplessness of his fatalistic characters, but most evocative of all are his inspired portraits of the bleakly relentless ice and water landscape of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia - the home he has never lost contact with.
Cyclical, at times quasi-historical, the novel unfolds through three main time sequences, returning to the dominant image of an earlier family patriarch, Calum Ruaidh, the leader of the clan which left Scotland in 1779 for a new life in Canada. Throughout the novel MacLeod uses a number of motifs and devices, the most powerful of which, as he has often demonstrated in his stories, are dogs and horses. They are the witnesses, passive observers who pay for their loyalty.
Literary prizes often cause debate and strife. Not this time, although the Russian Victor Pelevin, some 30 years MacLeod's junior, also had a strong claim. Had he won for The Clay Machine Gun it would have continued the Impac pattern of the past three years in awarding the prize to a young writer, but the judges were wise in selecting a traditional artist whose work will endure.
No Great Mischief is a haunting, almost mesmeric performance. The Impac judges corrected one of the biggest mistakes yet perpetrated by a Booker panel intent on surprise. MacLeod's win further endorses the prize.
