THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK
By Alice Munro
I hope it can be said without being glib or condescending that
one of the favourite literary genres for Canadians of a certain age and social
background to adopt is the family history/memoir. These volumes are typically
self-published retirement projects, and mainly meant to be shared among friends
and close relations. I have three of them sitting on my bookshelves now, written
by my grandfather, my father, and my aunt. Robert Laidlaw wrote a similar sort
of book in the form of a novel based on his family's pioneer past. And now with The
View From Castle Rock his daughter Alice has taken up the task.
She is conscious of the stereotype. When doing research on local
church cemeteries at the university reference library she knows the best way to
avoid questions about why she's interested in the subject is to say that she's
writing a family history. "Librarians are used to people doing that -
particularly people who have gray hair." This "rifling around in the
past," the passion for which strikes "mostly in our old age," is
almost a rite of passage now for the senior set.
But seeing as this particular project comes to us courtesy of
Alice Munro, it deserves special attention.
A coy "Foreword" explains that these stories were
written at various times over the years, but kept out of her other books because
they were "rather more personal." They do not, however,
constitute a memoir. They are explorations of Munro's life, but "not in an
austere or rigorously factual way." Things are made up. "You could say
that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually
does. But not enough to swear on."
So this is a work of fiction. Autobiographical yes, and perhaps
(though this is arguable) more personal than usual for Munro. But fiction all
the same.
The book is divided into two parts. The first, "No
Advantages," tells of Munro's Laidlaw ancestors leaving Scotland and
settling in that part of Ontario later to be identified by readers as
"Alice Munro country." This part of the book is most obviously
"full of . . . invention" - though there are old letters and journals
quoted throughout. It is also rather dull stuff, faithful in spirit to the
originals of the proud, silent, hard-working, and humorless natives of Munro
country, and their construction of lives "monastic without any visitations
of grace or moments of transcendence."
But of course those epiphanic moments and visitations are what
Munro's fiction is all about. In "No Advantages" they are muffled in
history. With the stories of the second part, "Home," we are on more
familiar ground. These are told in the first-person, and are based on characters
and events in Munro's own life. As the title of the section suggests, however,
the focus is less on the person than the place.
Munro has always been a regional author, which is a designation
that carries with it a certain attitude toward time as well as geography. Like a
lot of regional authors, Munro's outlook is conservative, even nostalgic, in its
attachment to the past. Things have certainly changed from "those
days" to "these days" (a formula that gets repeated here a bit
too often), and not all of the change has been for the better. But while the
bank barns and orchards have given way to industrial farms, the elemental
character of the place - the physical landscape of Huron County and the
character of its native rural population - is something that endures.
The View From Castle Rock is obviously a lot more than a
conventional Ontario family history and memoir. But it is also a lot less than
Munro's best work. Which is not to totally discount it. Munro on a bad day is
still a better read than most writers on a good one. But the usual magic music
of her language is only playing faintly in the background here, dominated by
easy notes of local colour and sentimental charm. Strong evidence that this
great mythic ground - perhaps the greatest in all our literature - may finally
be written out.
Notes:
Review first published in Quill & Quire, October 2006.
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