ABOUT THE BOOK

This is a story of families, and of the ties that bind us to them. It is also a story of exile and of the ties that bind us, generations later, to the land from which our ancestors came. In 1779 Calum MacDonald set sail from the Highlands of Scotland with his extensive family, and the loyal family dog that swam out to join them. It was a long, hard voyage below decks - he left Scotland a husband and father and arrived in Canada a widower and a grandfather - and the early years in Cape Breton were not easy. But the family settled in "the land of trees" and grew and spread until it became almost a separate Nova Scotia clan, red-haired and dark-eyed, with its own story.

It is the 1980s by the time our narrator, Alexander MacDonald, tells the story of his family. Raised by their grandparents, he and his twin sister have done well and left home. He is an orthodontist in Ontario, his sister a prosperous oilman's wife in Calgary. Together they marvel at how the family story intersects with history: with Culloden, where the clans died, and with the 1759 battle at Quebec won by the English General Wolfe with the help of the Highlanders whom he once recommended as soldiers because it was " no great mischief if they fall." Part of the MacDonald family is still at risk: Alexander's older brothers are specialist shaft miners, in demand around the world from South Africa to Peru for their dangerous skills.

When our narrator graduates from university in 1968 they are at work at Elliot Lake in the uranium mines, where a misunderstanding with a French-Canadian crew leads to an accident. Fresh from university, with a soft white-collar job awaiting him, out of loyalty Alexander feels obliged to join the family mining crew. And in that long hot summer in the bush, although they share fiddle tunes and the same clannish culture, the tension between the Cape Breton men and the French Canadians continues to mount.

The music of the Cape Breton rings throughout this book, by turns joyful and sad but always haunting. Written in a hypnotic, stately prose where every word is perfectly placed, 'No Great Mischief' has the same haunting effect, and shows why the master craftsman took more than ten years to write it. This is a magnificent new novel from a writer about to become a household word.

Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1936 and raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He still spends his summers in Inverness County, writing in a clifftop cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island. In his early years, to finance his education he worked as a logger, a miner, and a fisherman, and writes vividly and sympathetically about such work.

During the winter months Dr. MacLeod is a professor of English at the University of Windsor Ontario. His early studies were at the Nova Scotia Teachers College, St. Francis Xavier, the University of New Brunswick, and Notre Dame, where he took his Ph. D. He has also taught creative writing at the University of Indiana. Working alongside W.O. Mitchell, he was an inspiring teacher to generations of writers at the Banff Centre. Alistair MacLeod has given lectures and readings from his work in many cities in Canada and around the world. He and his wife, Anita, have six children: they live in Windsor.

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Here are some readers' thoughts on "No Great Mischief":

"This book comes laden with well-deserved bouquets and is indeed a beautiful book. Although described as a novel, for most of its length you feel you are reading a memoir of the MacDonald family or the wider clan, of Scot's Gaelic origin, living in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Their founding father Calum Ruadh arrived there in the 1790's and they still feel part of and are recognised as Clann Chalum Ruaidh. The narrator is one Alexander MacDonald known as "ille bhig ruaidh", whose fortunes differ so widely from that of his eldest brother, Calum. Their parents who were lighthouse keepers were drowned when Calum and Alexander were 16 and 3 year's old respectively. Alexander and his twin sister were reared by their grandparents while Calum and two other brothers moved out of the town (into an old house formerly occupied by the grandparents) and exist on subsistence fishing and farming.
This is a story of contrasting lives, the twins nurtured by the grandparents, the older siblings living a rough, tough, chaotic and sometimes violent existence. Yet the family bonds are strong, the clan ethic being, 'always look out for your own'.

Alexander becomes a fashionable orthodontist in Ottawa, while Calum, through many vicissitudes, mostly in mining in places as far apart as Peru and South Africa as well as Canada, ultimately winds up on Skid Row.

The parallel lives can be compared with the harsh and often cruel landscape of Cape Breton and the softer farming landscape of South Ottawa. But the overriding theme is family solidarity, "always be loyal to your blood kin".
Alistair MacLeod has a wonderful turn of phrase. When two small fighting cousins are separated by Grandpa, "small indignant feet kicked at the air". Again, when Calum cuts his head in a drunken fall, the blood "seems to follow the contours of his face as a mountain river follows the land before falling into the sea".

This is a haunting, poignant story, both heartbreaking and heart-warming. It must surely make the short list and I hope it wins the Prize."

(Member Raheny Readers Group)

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"This beautifully written book is a grand panorama of the history of a family, or more accurately a tribe from their distant past in Scotland to their present day descendants in Cape Breton, who, although living in completely different circumstances, are acutely conscious of their past - a past linked to history, where even their animals are part of the pattern and are characters in their own right.

Their vision of the past is almost painfully clear. There is a wonderful atmosphere and sense of place. I particularly remember the descriptions of the icy landscape, not only on one tragic occasion but simple things like the older brothers' water supply - a solid block of ice in the bottom of the bucket. "The circle would be of translucent crystal, like the perfect product turned out of the mould, bearing all the indentations and contours of the bucket which had shaped it, and with small bits of grass and leaves and sometimes tiny berries frozen within its shimmering transparency." The brothers out in a boat trying to create a rainbow. The horse bringing in the boat. Grandpa drunk on the floor being decorated like a Christmas tree. The operation of the mine. There are endless others.

A tide of history and memories advances, recedes. Time passes, the past is visited and revisited, people and animals recalled many times. There is celebration of the joys of life, but an underlying sadness. The narrator and his sister have made a leap forward to a different world from that of their parents and of their older brothers. They have gained immensely in material ways, but are obsessed with the past and with a sense of what they have lost.

If towards the end of the book the nostalgia was becoming just a bit too much for me, and the repetition a little bit too repetitious, I felt that I had been breathing the cold clear air of Cape Breton and been granted an insight into a part of human history, and had read a very worthwhile book."

Member Raheny Library Reading Group.

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"This is a nicely written, easy to read account of a family's determination to keep alive it's Scottish roots and traditions despite having lived for generations in Nova Scotia.

The story spans a period of approximately 200 years - 1779 to the 1980's - and is more a series of family reminiscences than a novel.

The MacDonalds fought and survived wars on both sides of the Atlantic, they suffered tragedies and battled against the harsh Canadian winters but could always count on the support of the clan.

Alexander MacDonald is the narrator of the story, relating the family history, its attachment to things Gaelic, its music and language.

While I enjoyed the book as a pleasant read, I wouldn't expect it to be the outright winner of the IMPAC Award."

(A member of Raheny Library Reading Group.)