The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

My first book of 2014 was intended to start me out on the path I intend to follow this year.  I have decided that I need to read more short fiction - especially more collections of short fiction - and what better place to start than with Alice Munro?  Early in 2012 I read the title story of this collection (and recorded a few thoughts here).  But the story read in context of the whole collection becomes richer, more nuanced, even more powerful.

The View from Castle Rock is a book that defies categorisation; it sits on its own with elements of memoir, short fiction, and the novel weaving in and out.  After years researching her family history, Alice Munro found herself fascinated by the people in her past.  The stories in the first half of the book are her imagined histories of these ancestors who emigrated from Scotland in the early nineteenth-century to the area now known as Alice Munro Country.  In the second half of the book she writes about the family she knows, about her parents, her relatives and herself.

I found a lot in this book that resonated with me, especially in the latter stories.  As the descendent of those same Presbyterian Scots who emigrated to the area just a county or two south, a generation or two later than her ancestors I saw reflections of my own family history in more than one story.  But the unique ability of Alice Munro to create characters with such humanity, such depth, such truth, without resorting to cliche or sentimentality is astounding.  They are characters who stick with me.  I find myself thinking of them long after closing the book, remembering the way Aunt Charlie sat at the sewing machine, or the way Russell walked when he carried his trombone, the light on the apple blossoms and the feeling of swimming beside the boathouse on Georgian Bay.  She writes about herself in such a disarming manner - she seems to have such clarity about how it felt to have been herself so many years ago, for I recognise the truth of her discomfort, her inability to know what to say at the right moment, her hesitations, her secret desires.

I am looking forward to reading more Alice Munro this year, along with a few other collections by Diane Schoemperlen and Margaret Laurence and Lisa Moore and Mavis Gallant.

Alice Munro photo credit: Paul Hawthorne/Canadian Press

The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

Included as the first story in Jane Urquhart's Penquin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007), it is also the title story from Alice Munro's collection of short stories by the same name.  Somewhere (cottage? packed?) I have the collection, but am only able to read this story on it's own at the moment.  Munro is a master, truly the finest, wordsmith.  She can write a sentence to bring you to your knees with it's perfection, and create a scene with slight of hand.

The family leaves Scotland for the new world and the vividness of live aboard fills all the senses.  When the son is cheeky to the father, Munro describes:

Barely on board the vessel and this seventeen-year-old whelp has taken on knowing airs, he has taken to contradicting his father.  Fatique, astonishement and the weight of the great coat he is wearing prevent Old James from cuffing him.

and,

Agnes comes from a large Hawick family of weavers, who work in the mills now but worked for generations at home.  And working there they learned all the arts of cutting each other down to size, of squabbling and surviving in close quarters.

Alice Munro paints such vivid images, often just on the verge an extreme of comedy or surrealism.  But, we can feel what she expresses happening in the minds of each of the characters as, for instance, the view of the homeland recedes and the tears and sadness turn to boredom and loss of interest.  Each of the characters has a different reaction and Munro honours each: Agnes does not want to move herself, she has different pain to consider; Old James is loyal to his town but not a nationalist, his loyalties are parochial; it is a solemn and majestic moment for Walter, the narrator.  Munro can paint a picture, and the images endure because they are not merely physical, but emotional descriptions.