page_title: Alistair MacLeod
section_title: Novel
hierarchical_section_title: Alistair MacLeod / Critical reaction / Novel
caption_attribution_description: English: Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod reads from his work
context_page_description: Alistair MacLeod, OC FRSC was a Canadian novelist, short story writer and academic. His powerful and moving stories vividly evoke the beauty of Cape Breton Island's rugged landscape and the resilient character of many of its inhabitants, the descendants of Scottish immigrants, who are haunted by ancestral memories and who struggle to reconcile the past and the present. MacLeod has been praised for his verbal precision, his lyric intensity and his use of simple, direct language that seems rooted in an oral tradition.
  Although he is known as a master of the short story, MacLeod's 1999 novel No Great Mischief was voted Atlantic Canada's greatest book of all time. The novel also won several literary prizes including the 2001 International Dublin Literary Award.
  In 2000, MacLeod's two books of short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories, were re-published in the volume Island: The Collected Stories. MacLeod compared his fiction writing to playing an accordion. "When I pull it out like this," he explained, "it becomes a novel, and when I compress it like this, it becomes this intense short story."
context_section_description: MacLeod's 1999 novel, No Great Mischief tells the story of the red-haired and dark-eyed MacDonald clan from 1779 when they left Scotland to settle in Cape Breton to more recent times. The judges, who awarded MacLeod the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2001, described the novel as "a story of families, and of the ties that bind us to them. It is also a story of exile and of the ties that bind us, generations later, to the land from which our ancestors came." They went on to predict that the quality of MacLeod's writing would soon make his name a household word. "The music of the Cape Breton rings throughout this book, by turns joyful and sad but always haunting. Written in a hypnotic, stately prose where every word is perfectly placed, ‘No Great Mischief’ has the same haunting effect, and shows why the master craftsman took more than ten years to write it."
  Those observations were echoed by many reviewers. In The New York Times, for example, Thomas Mallon praised the book's lyricism and reported that  "MacLeod's world of Cape Breton – with its Scottish fishermen and their displaced heirs, the miners and young professionals it has mournfully sent to the rest of the nation – has become a permanent part of my own inner library." Mallon's main criticism was that parts of the novel came across as heavy handed, lacking the deftness of MacLeod's short fiction. He ended, however, by noting that MacLeod's entire body of work would soon be published in the U.S. granting American readers "a new land that their imaginations can seize like a manifest destiny."
  In the British newspaper, The Observer, Stephanie Merritt pointed out that when it was first published, No Great Mischief drew "unqualified praise" from the critics. Her review of the paperback edition concluded: "In its poetic and emotional range, this is one of the richest novels of recent years."
  The Globe and Mail's critic Kenneth J. Harvey heaped praise on both the book and its author: "The book has it all: beauty,
  tragedy, grittiness, humour, darkness, love, music, raunchiness, poetry and a glut of fully drawn, extraordinary characters whose words and deeds and circumstances compel the reader to laugh and blush and weep and swell with bighearted pride...MacLeod is MacLeod, the greatest living Canadian writer and one of the most distinguished writers in the world. No Great Mischief is the book of the year – and of this decade. It is a once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece."
caption: MacLeod reads from his work
exif: {"Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS 10D", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "1969:12:31 19:36:58", "Image ExifOffset": "210", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/50", "EXIF FNumber": "14/5", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "800", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2003:11:16 05:52:14", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2003:11:16 05:52:14", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "3", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "3217/570", "EXIF ApertureValue": "12742/4289", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "12742/4289", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "70", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3110", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2497", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "127426/37", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "199637/58", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera"}