Rating: 7.7/10.
This novel is a well known piece of Nova Scotia’s literature, about the Scottish people on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. It starts with the narrator, a successful dentist, visiting his older brother Calum in Toronto: Calum is an alcoholic living in a sketchy part of town and feeling lost from his family values. Then, the novel cuts back to the beginning of the family’s settlement in the Americas. The family history begins with the patriarch Calum MacDonald who came to Nova Scotia from Scotland in the 18th century by boat with twelve children, during which his wife Catherine dies before they arrive. Throughout many generations, the MacDonalds proliferate across the island, with many of their descendants speaking Gaelic and associating themselves with “Clann Chalum Ruaidh” or the Red Calum Clan.
This is the background for the modern-day story, which begins sometime in the 1950s and focuses on narrator Alexander McDonald. During his childhood, his parents die in an accident on the ice, and he is raised by his grandparents along with his older brother Calum. They live relatively privileged lives with their grandparents compared to many of their cousins, who grow up in much harsher conditions. Alexander becomes educated and graduates from university, while many of his family members go to work as miners in Sudbury. They have ethnic conflicts in the mines with the French Canadians, who have a different language and customs. Towards the end of the book, a distant cousin comes from California to escape the draft and ends up working in the mine; soon after a conflict arises between the Scottish and French miners, culminating in Calum killing one of the French miners and going to prison for a few years.
Much of the story revolves around the changing world and the people who reminisce about the past and are proud of their family clans and history. This fuels an identity strongly attached to family values, where they tend to be tough and work labor jobs. The narrator, who has an education and a professional job, is successful in life but separated from his family’s clan values whereas his brother Calum is more attached to the family tradition but feels out of place in the modern world.
