Alistair MacLeod is a Canadian national treasure. I hope they appreciate his talent as much as I. This collection reaches deep in to the psyche of natives of Cape Breton Island, descended from strong Scottish stock, roots deep within the land and the hard work necessary to maintain life and soul on the sometimes unforgiving islands. Alistair MacLeod’s sixteen short stories, collected in Island, are all set on Cape Breton Island off the coast of Nova Scotia in south-eastern Canada. Raised in Cape Breton in the 1960’s MacLeod writes primarily about a time and place closely related to his own.
![Alistair macleod the boat Alistair macleod the boat](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125510116/243473962.jpg)
The Boat (1968): changing traditions in Cape Breton (Dr Jennifer Minter, English Works)The boat, Jenny Lynn, is named after the mother’s maiden name, which links her to a “chain of tradition” among the fishermen on the bitter-windswept island. It becomes a natural marker of one who is “of the sea” as are “our people”. But the boat comes to represent so much more and whilst it represents the mother’s place, it signifies the father’s failed dreams and his own sense of disappointment, both as a husband and father. He is forced to carve out an existence at sea against his wishes. To the son, the boat represents the father’s courage because he believes it was “very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations.” (21)And the boat comes to represent the mother’s sense of bitterness at the fact that neither the father nor the son is able to sustain the fisherman’s life. Jenny Lynn represents the erosion of a way of life and the loss of an enduring tradition.The narrator and the boatThroughout The Boat, the narrator plays with time shifts as he impresses upon readers the fact that although he is describing a young boy who was always aware of his place within a seafaring household, such knowledge is only gradually revealed. “I say this now as if I knew it all then.
All at once But of course it was not that way at all, for I learned it all very slowly and there was not time enough”.For example, the young boy/narrator learns about the importance of the boat after his first ride with his father, described as a “precocious excursion”. All the villagers’ questions ended with “the boat” and “I knew it must be very important to everyone”. And it is the 16 year old boy who takes the uncle’s place and joins the father for the important “May the first” lobster season. All their lives “depended on the boat” and the young boy, who at one stage watched the trawlers from the high school hill, soon bids farewell to “The Tempest and “David Copperfield”. MacLeod’s narrator must make a choice between the two things “I loved so dearly” which excluded each other “in a manner that was so blunt and too clear”.The narrator remembers that his awareness of boat and of people are mutually dependent and although the narrator tells of the father’s ambiguous relationship with the sea, at first, the memories of father and boat are etched in his mind as of one who smells of the salt and wears huge rubber boots.
The memory is of a man who has become the fisherman he resents. “My earliest recollection of my father is a view from the floor of gigantic rubber boots and then of being suddenly elevated and having my face pressed against the stubble of his cheek, and of how it tasted of salt and of how he smelled of salt from his red-soled rubber boots to the shaggy whiteness of his hair” (2)His earliest recollections of “my mother” are also associated with her supportive role as she is always organising the food “to be eaten in the boat”. Whilst the fishermen become embroiled in the daily life of the boat, it is the women who name them and who own the traditions.
“Most of the boats berthed at the wharf bore the names of some female member of their owner’s household”.Jenny Lynn and The MotherJenny Lynn, which belongs to “us” and represents “our people”, links the narrator’s mother to the seafaring tradition on Cape Breton (she is “of the sea as were all of her people”) and this gives her a sense of place which she maintains, proudly, through discipline and routine. “My mother ran her house as her brothers ran their boats. Everything was clean and spotless and in order.” (5) She is therefore firmly rooted in, and limited to, the place, that defines her. “Her horizons were the very literal ones she scanned with her dark and fearless eyes.” (6)The Mother meticulously devotes herself to domestic chores, baking bread, and knitting. She energetically responds to a demanding environment, raising “broods of hens”, hoisting her skirt to “dig for clams when the tide was low” and walking for miles on berry-picking expeditions. The sea determines the rhythm of her whole life including her affections, to such an extent that she comes to look “upon the sea with love and on you (son) with bitterness because the one has been so constant and the other so untrue”. (25)As MacLeod so poignantly shows, the mother’s energetic spirit dominates the kitchen and the kitchen becomes the “buffer zone” that separates order from chaos, and the multitude from the “single room that was my father’s.” The kitchen is “where we really lived our lives”; it is breezy, open and visible to all.Contrastingly, the father yearns for a life that is beyond the constraints of his natural environment as symbolised by the light that shines “constantly from his window to the sea”.
![Macleod Macleod](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125510116/550434819.jpg)
His room “of disorder and disarray” reflects his yearning spirit and the desire for a life of the imagination that is always elsewhere. He seems out of place, “massive and incongruous in the setting” and the personified wind that sweeps through his room aiding the clutter mocks his escapist tendencies.