Fiction 2

'90 LETTERS IN CANADA 1999 Sloate, Daniel. Lydia Thrippe! Guemica. 88. $12.00 Smith, Ron. Whal Men Knowaboul Women. Oolichan. 236. $17.95 Solomon, Evan. Crossing Ihe Dislance. McClelland and Stewart. 374· $29.99 Wedman, Neil. Burlesck.{cartoons) Advance! Arsenal. 94. $14.95 Wilson, Alan R. Before Ihe Flood. Cormorant. 236. $21.95 Wilson, Robert Rawdon. Boundaries, and Otller Fictions. University of Alberta Press. 214. $16·95 2 / SUSAN KNUTSON Alistair MacLeod is by no means the first Canadian author to interest himself in the historical play between the Highlanders and the French in Canada. From Philippe Aubert de Gaspe to Margaret Laurence to Catharine Parr Traill, Canadian authors have given us fictional Highlanders and French Canadians whose union - or whose failure to unite - prefigures the birth of the Canadian nation. If the theme is not new, however, MacLeod's treatment of it is still fresh, disclosing much that has become obscure, and reconfiguring most of the fundamental categories Canadians USe when talking and thinkirlg about national identity. Initially strikirlg is the rivalry - itself archaic and extreme - between two fighting clans and their leaders, Calum MacDonald and Fern Picard. We ... were standing in the middle of the path when we saw Fern Picard approaching. The path was narrow and we stood two abreast. His pace seemed to quicken when he saw us, and his increased speed seemed to emphasize how big he was. There was no space for him to pass without his leaving the path, and it seemed certain he was not going to do that. 'Well, I have to go: Isaid at the last moment, vacating my place on the path. Fern Picard's shoulder brushed my brother's as he passed and we heard him say, 'Mange la merde' under his breath. 'Macan diabhoil,' I heard my brother say, and each of them spat, as if on cue, into the centre of the path. Although this rivalry will end in death for one man and prison for the other, the book does not take an entirely negative view of it, but rather explores the phenomenon of clan leadership, chieftainship, and kingship, from a historical and romantic perspective. MacLeod underlines the Highlanders ' loyalty to their leaders, the betrayal of those leaders by their allies, and the leaders' sometime betrayal of a people who 'believed they had a king.' The peoples' fidelity, like that of family dogs, schools of herring, or birds returning to their breeding grounds, is a mighty, mysterious, and even mystical force. Such an archaic organization based on kirlship is qualified, however, by MacLeod's recognition of the genetic relations binding the French, the FICTION 191 English, the Scots, and the First Nations, from General Wolfe who, like the ciann Chalum Ruaidh, had red hair (clan members' hair is either red or black), to James MacDonald, the James Bay Cree who was no less a cOllsin agam fhein. Somewhere near the centre of all these connections, where 'ethnic purity: did it exist, might be supposed to lie, is the figure of the Prince himself, with his red hair, his French language and his uncontrolled descendance: 'Although he was our Prince, he was raised in France and spoke mainly French, while we spoke Gaelic. About a thousand men went with him from here. The Bmtach Ban, the white and crimson banner, was blessed at Glenfinnan by MacDonald.... We could have won ... if the boats had come from France. We could have won if the rest of the country had joined with us. It was worth fighting fOf, our own land and our own people, and our own way of being.' The parallel experience of the French Canadians at Quebec and the Scots at Culloden, one of several historical ironies binding the heirs of the two nations. MacLeod also interprets the Highlanders as an indigenous people, comparing their experience to that of the Masai on the plain at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, in the south of Kenya near the border of Tanzania. Radical and understated, he highlights the genocidal danger which threatens the Masai as he weaves in a comparison between them and the equally 'troublesome' Highlanders who were once removed from the land where they had...