No Great Mischief
(Alistair MacLeod)
This is the worst book I?ve read in quite some time and perhaps theworst I ever read all the way through: I?m not a masochist; if a book?sthis bad I?ll generally drop it; life?s too short. No Great Mischief (or, as I started calling it after a while, No Great Shakes)centers on the daytrip a successful Canadian dentist takes to visit hisdecade-older brother, an old man now, living in a tenement in his finalillness. The device (the oh-so-tedious device) is the passing day,driven home by endless revisits to a scene of orchard pickers thedentist passes on his way; the body of the book (near three hundredpages) consists of the dentist?s and his brother?s memories, theirshared past and the storylines embedded there?the accidental death oftheir parents when the dentist was a toddler, the summer after collegethe dentist spent with this and his other brothers and his cousinsmining for uranium in western Canada, the larger history of the family,a branch of a Scottish clan transplanted to but still quite clannish inthe New World, at least until the dentist?s generation. But all of thisdecently promising material is made hateful for being so poorlyhandled. Primitive, artless, the writing clumsy and feeble, thedialogue stilted, every sentence as divorced from beauty as advertisingcopy, relying for artistic elevation on imagery and episodes obviouslymeant to be lyric but more often contrived. I understand MacLeod?strying to create an oral-traditional tone, as if we were all sittingaround a campfire together, but he doesn?t get it right. What?s meantto be folksy comes across dully repetitive?how many times, forinstance, does he need to remind us that you can?t tell timeunderground? Innocent of insight and originality, the book?s ultimatelyjust very boring. There are (precious few) fun tidbits?for instance,the word clan is pronounced?kown? by Highlanders, apparently; apparently, certain spruce treesthat grow by the ocean give off sparks when you saw into them, becauseof the salt embedded in their trunks. But these are tiny gaps betweenvast, unilluminated tracts of third-person narration and flat,predictable episodes. What?s so infuriating is the potential here?why Inever just threw it over?themes of family and the tie to the (tribaland adopted) land and the omnipresent, inescapable shadow history castsover everyday life, not to mention all the charm I thoughtcharacterized stories by Celts,about Celts. The real Celts I?ve knownare inexhaustibly witty, they don?t repeat themselves, aren?t tedious,can tell a good story. MacLeod clearly lost touch with these people along time ago, if he ever had anything to do with them.
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