No Great Mischief by Alistair McLeod
“All of us are better when we’re loved.”
Alistair McLeod holds a very special place in my heart as a giant of Canadian literature. His stories pull me in and when I disappear into the pages, I smell the salt in the air, feel the creaky wooden floorboards under my feet, and hear the hum of lively conversation happening out in the backyard, just beyond the open window. In my early twenties, when I was still pursuing a BA in English, I first encountered McLeod through the Island: The Collected Stories. From that collection, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun is the one that I still think about to this day. It was family mythology wrought inescapable, inexorably threading back and forth through the strands of time. I was hooked.
When I finally came to his novel No Great Mischief, it became one of my favourite books. Narrated by the family’s successful youngest son Alexander MacDonald, who is driving to Toronto to see his older brother Callum, the book explores how the experiences of home and heritage expands into everywhere that we have ever been, and collapses into the smallest crux of everything we hold dear. Rooted in Cape Breton, with tendrils all over Canada, the novel tells of a complicated family dynamic, laying out, in no uncertain terms, how love in a family can simultaneously be a strong binding thread and a frayed ribbon of connection. I am deeply drawn to stories like this that travel across generations and geography, and this time-travel is executed so beautifully by McLeod.
This time around was a reread for me, and it was fun to realise that I was drawn to the same lines as I was back then, reaching for my highlighter to mark passages that I had already underlined years ago. In many ways, it felt like having a conversation with my younger, pre-pandemic self. As an immigrant myself, many of the themes brought up about the Scots diaspora in Canada also resonated with me: the necessity and ephemerality of language, the retelling of family stories until it becomes mythology, and the generational nuances that are lost and gained when it comes to diasporic identity.
Dani Magsumbol 