Island

Island: The Collected Stories is the collected short fiction of Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod, published in 2000 and set almost entirely on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Its sixteen stories examine lives bound to the sea and the coal seam, and it is studied in HSC English Extension 1 in the elective Natural worlds.

Island: The Collected Stories (2000) gathers the short fiction Alistair MacLeod published with famous slowness across his lifetime: two thin collections from the 1970s and 1980s, with a few later pieces. Raised from the age of ten on the family farm in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, MacLeod worked as a miner and a logger to pay for his education, and returned each summer to write, longhand, in a clifftop cabin above the sea. Almost every story he wrote is set on that Gaelic-settled island, a place where people live at the mercy of the sea and the coal seam, bound to the non-human by work, weather and inheritance rather than by leisure.

Sixteen stories share a single controlling preoccupation: what it means to be a creature made by a place that does not need you, cannot be possessed, and will outlast you. In "The Boat", a university teacher remembers his fisherman father, a secret reader who worked the sea his whole life without loving it, and who is lost overboard late one autumn, after which his son leaves for an education. "The Closing Down of Summer" is a present-tense meditation by an ageing miner in the last days before his crew travels overseas to sink another shaft. "As Birds Bring Forth the Sun" is a fable of the great grey dog, the cu mor glas, reared by human hands, gone wild, and mythologised into an omen of death. "Winter Dog" remembers the half-wild animal that dragged a boy back from drowning on the sea ice, and "The Vastness of the Dark" follows a restless eighteen-year-old who discovers that the coal is in the blood and distance cannot undo what a place has made.

The sea in "The Boat" is home, livelihood, beauty and killer at once, and the story holds two forms of belonging side by side. The mother is "of the sea as were all of her people", loving the water with a constancy she cannot extend to a family that keeps leaving it - she looks "upon the sea with love and on you with bitterness because the one has been so constant and the other so untrue". The father endures rather than belongs, and his drowning is delivered in flat monosyllables that withhold all drama: "I turned and he was not there and I knew even in that instant that he would never be again". The son's mature verdict, that it is "very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations", refuses to let a silent sacrifice read as defeat.

"The Closing Down of Summer" reads the human relationship to nature as extraction, and mourns it. The deep earth is given a blank sentience in the "eerie tunnels of the drifts that end in walls of staring stone", while the elegiac present tense folds weather, ageing and ending into one clause: "It is August now, towards the end, and the weather can no longer be trusted." The miner knows his sons "will be far removed from the physical life and will seek it out only through jogging or golf", so the story elegises a bodily way of knowing nature as it disappears.

The animal other is held on the exact border of the domestic and the wild. "As Birds Bring Forth the Sun" opens in the fable register, "Once there was a family with a Highland name who lived beside the sea.", and its once-loved dog becomes the cu mor glas a' bhais, the grey dog of death, glimpsed "Always in the area of the half-perceived." before each family death. "Winter Dog" runs the bond in both directions, rescue and violence at once, and closes on anaphora that refuses tidy closure: "He persists in my memory and in my life and he persists physically as well."

Beneath all four registers runs inheritance as a natural, almost geological force: the Gaelic carried from the Clearances, the grandfather's insistence that once you "drink underground water" you always return, and a collection that keeps refusing the consolations of pastoral.

• Dropbear
• New and Selected Poems, Volume One
• Sand Talk
• The Hare with Amber Eyes
• Autumn
• As I Lay Dying
• The Darjeeling Limited
• All HSC English resources