The Clan That Lost Its Past
The Age
Monday May 17, 2004
Descendants of Scottish highlanders lose their way as homeland ties disintegrate. By Valerie Sutherland.
IT IS possible to appreciate Alistair MacLeod's novel No Great Mischief without a detailed knowledge of the history of Scottish immigration to Nova Scotia, but some background does help.
The title is taken from a comment made by General James Wolfe, the leader of the British forces who defeated the French in the battle for Canada in 1759. He was referring to the Scottish Highlanders who formed part of his army in the final battle at the Plains of Abraham near Quebec.
They were ``hardy and intrepid" fighters but for Wolfe it was ``no great mischief" if they fell. In his eyes, the highland clansmen were ``troublesome", rough, uncultured and so dispensable cannon fodder.
This family saga is simultaneously a lament for the passing of a traditional lifestyle and a celebration of the power of the loving bonds of family. It is also a meditation on the way memory, legend, fact and imagination together weave the fabric of history. Alexander MacDonald, a well-heeled orthodontist with a thriving Ontario practice, has a comfortable home, a wife and children. He spends every Saturday going to Toronto and visiting his older brother, Calum, a shambling alcoholic living in a sordidly run-down boarding house.
Alexander, known to his family as Gille Beag Ruadh (Gaelic for ``the little red-haired boy"), narrates the detail of one such Saturday visit and in the process recreates for us the shared history of his clan. The final chapter is an epilogue in which, six months later, he drives Calum back to die on the wind-lashed island of Cape Breton where they were born.
The story of the migration of the MacDonald clan to Nova Scotia is passed down to new generations of the family through songs and tales of heroism such as that of Calum Ruadh, Alexander's great-great-great-grandfather, the first generation to travel from Scotland. The contemporary siblings share stories they have heard from grandparents and their own memories of events in an effort to make sense of the past. We are able to piece together these fragments with Alexander's direct narration to form some understanding of the disintegration of a way of life.
The image of the migrating birds that fly in a V formation with a leader at the apex symbolises the journey of the MacDonalds away from the highland clearances and the battle of Culloden, at which the clans made a last stand for their ancient tribal way of life. They felt they were migrating to a land of greater promise, ``the land of contentment", with Calum Ruadh leading the way. As he drives through the autumn Ontario farmlands, Alexander notices the ``imported workers" harvesting the crops in ``this land (which) is not their own" and immediately makes the connection with his grandmother and her lifelong habit of frugality born of necessity.
The sharp contrast between the comfort he and his twin sister Catriona enjoyed and the disadvantages endured by their three older brothers after the deaths of their parents is carried into their adult situations. Living in squalid and harsh conditions, the three teenagers develop into men of unrefined habits, drinking, brawling and carousing wildly between periods of hard and dirty labouring.
Although he carries the ancestral name of Calum Ruadh, Alexander's eldest brother has lost his role as leader of the clan. How far apart their lives have become is seen in the orthodontist's tale of his brother extracting a bad tooth by tying it to his horse.
Central to the narrator's sense of identity is the idea that the individual is defined by his membership of the group - something expressed as one of his grandmother's aphorisms, ``blood is thicker than water". On his first day at school, the child Alexander has to be reminded of his name: to him, it is a ``foreign sound", so accustomed is he to being called by his family nickname.
The story of the tree that is sawn through at its base is a metaphor for the place of the individual in the MacDonald clan. So ``densely intertwined" are the canopies of the closely grouped trees around it that it is unable to fall. The ``tall straight tree severed at its stump" symbolises Calum, orphaned at 16 and unable to extend his branches beyond that adolescent phase.
While the clan is celebrated for the way it supports each member, group loyalty has an underside. The tribal conflict that spurred the clan to leave the old country finds a new manifestation in Canada in rivalry with the descendants of the French. Working as a uranium miner in his brother's team, the educated Alexander forms a bond with the French-speaking Marcel Gingras. Both realise that their personal reconciliation is not strong enough to combat the ferocity of the traditional conflict between the groups and the potential they have to forge links outside their tribes is crushed, like rival Fern Picard's skull, by the wrench wielded by Calum.
Despite the arctic harshness of the environment, the family's early life on Cape Breton was marked by a communal warmth missing in Alexander's luxurious urban life in Ontario. The straight and narrow highway along which he drives back to his birthplace is ``flat and boring", like the life he now leads, away from his clan. Where the name MacDonald once signified a heroic readiness to ``stand boldly" in the face of adversity, in the consumerist society of the late 20th century it has become the brand name of ``the guys who make the hamburgers".
Faced with the end of the life of the clan on Cape Breton, Alexander is left only with its symbol - the Celtic never-ending circle - and a melancholy acceptance.
Valerie Sutherland teaches VCE English and literature at Box Hill Senior Secondary College.
USEFUL WEBSITES
www.cabottrail.com/history/
www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/no-great-mischief.asp
www.geocities.com/Broadway/Alley/5443/cullpol.htm
www.scottishweb.net/features/clearances/clearancemain.htm
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
• The Blood is Strong (video) Volume 1, ``There is no Joy without Clan Donald" VCLOC 917 (available through Brigadier Scottish Shop www.brigadier.com.au/videos.htm
• The Shipping News
© 2004 The Age
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