At its finest, the art of the short story can more than hold its own against the novel. This has been proved time and again by masters such as Chekhov, V.S. Pritchett, Eudora Welty, William Trevor, Alice Munro, John McGahern, John Cheever, Richard Ford, Russell Banks and Alistair MacLeod. It comes as no surprise to see McGahern has written a foreword to this rich collection. He and MacLeod have a great deal in common as writers. Both have an understanding of the small gesture, of life's essential injustice, of the unspoken phrase that says so much and leaves the reader thinking, remembering and, to some extent, changed.
Each of these 16 stories is as powerful and complete as any written, at any time. It is not surprising that MacLeod has been acknowledged as a great writer on the basis of a small body of work, his two previous collections The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986). Even before he won an international audience with his magnificent dΘbut novel No Great Mischief, his stories appearing slowly and carefully in magazines and anthologies during a 30-year period filled the silence created by so much contemporary fiction that seems to say so little.
Each of MacLeod's layered stories, like letters despatched at lengthy intervals, act as lifelines from a factual, unsentimental sensibility possessing a feel for the individual in isolation.
Few writers have written as well or as truthfully about those all-knowing, all-feeling heroes - dogs. MacLeod has a huge advantage as an artist, aside from his command of language, his raw lyricism, his respect for the hardship of life and the enormity of death, he understands the force of history as only those caught between cultures can. Critics often refer to the US writers having a clear advantage in writing out of a vast landscape. MacLeod as a Canadian also shares that - his Cape Breton landscape of ice and water is unrelenting - but in addition, as a sixth generation Scot, he shares the often oppressively comforting intimacy common to Irish writers.
His battered characters, often long-lived, are as much victims of time as anyone else's, but aside from age they also have the weight of their place within their family's history. "The MacCrimmons were said to be given two gifts," says an ancient grandmother to the narrator, her adult grandson, "the gift of music and the gift of foreseeing their own deaths." There are always witnesses. Sons see fathers fall, wives and mothers learn to live without their men. Although death is so central in his stories, survival is a major theme.
Equally important is a desire for recognition. "I have always wished that my children could see me at my work," confides the narrator of 'The Closing Down of Summer'. "That they might journey down with me in the dripping cage to the shaft's bottom or walk the eerie tunnels of the drifts that end in walls of staring stone." Change, particularly the fear of it, is another constant. Generations of fishermen and miners have in turn seen their children set off for the big cities from whence they return as strangers. 'Clearances' the most recent story, represents a different aspect of change, progress at its most brutal.
Unlike Annie Proulx with whom he also shares a vision, MacLeod never pushes his art or his language.
Nominating the best story in this collection is not easy. But 'Island' is outstanding. MacLeod's women are strong, if suffering, often curiously passive. In 'Island' he looks at one woman's life. The central character is born to aged islanders who tend a lighthouse. Her youth is spent in a twilight zone until a young man enters her world. A trust is established and he promises to return. He never does and her child is born in disgrace and rumour only to be taken from her by relatives. "She, herself, as the child of their advanced years, seemed suddenly willing to consider herself old also and to identify with the past now that her future seemed to point in that direction." She eventually takes over managing the lighthouse. Her daughter has nothing to do with her. "The years of the next decade passed by in a blur of monotonous sameness." More time passes.
It is heartbreaking. MacLeod never loses control. Another masterwork is 'The Lost Salt Gift of Blood' in which a father arrives to visit the young son he long ago lost touch with and whose mother has been killed. The boy's maternal grandparents are terrified of losing him to his father. MacLeod's handling of their polite hostility is unnervingly sure. Several of the finest stories you're likely to read are gathered here, written by one man, a natural storyteller.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times