Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2006/2007.
Sat. Feb
27, 2016
The View
from Castle Rock begins with documentation of the origins of Alice
Munro's birth family, the Laidlaws, in an isolated valley in the
south of Scotland. Although the book is subtitled "Stories"
and there is the usual disclaimer at the front - " . . . any
resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental," these stories have the feel of
autobiography and genealogy. In her Foreword, Munro does admit "the
part of this book that might be called family history has expanded
into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative."
Why do I want to know which events really happened? Why does not knowing seem somehow
disconcerting? The genealogist in me wants to dig out what is "real,"
what is "hard evidence." The writer in me wants to unearth
the creative process of a Nobel-Prize-winning Canadian female writer
who writes about so many things which interest me too. Especially the
origins of story, and the link between place and person, place and
personality. And the importance of that connection to place as one of
the ways we necessarily learn to Know Ourselves. Compare and
contrast. Similarities and differences. The scripts we learn by heart
from days before we learn to read, and ever after - while we still
live there with them, when we only visit, and then when we visit the
graveyards and the abandoned farmyards and farmhouses. It
is about time, and change, yet it is more than "the only constant is change." More than that.
I have
two favourites, stories which spring to mind when I think of this
book. The first, "The View from Castle Rock," because I have
visited Edinburgh Castle twice, and drunk in the view across the Firth of Forth to Fife, as Rebus so often does in Ian Rankin's
addictive detective stories about the city and a policeman who loves
it as much as does the writer. Place, then people. The people are
sojourners. Although it too changes physically, the place
remains. That's why I loved the second story too, "What Do You
Want to Know For?" about a man and wife driving the back roads
with an ever-present geological map, the story of the place told in
lines and colours.
I am
always astonished when I read Alice Munro about how similar our
experiences were, rural farm girl, small town, going away to city and
university, marrying, unmarrying, marrying again. Although a
generation apart, and settlement in my Manitoba was fifty years
later. The same but different. Houses, but woodframe and shiplap as
opposed to red brick. The variety of characters, but so many
archetypal.
I love
the restraint of Alice Munro's writing - the way she simply describes
the epiphany and trusts her readers to get it. In "Lying Under
the Apple Tree," when the narrator hears her boyfriend Russell
calling another woman "honey," she's out / gone. No
questions asked, no confrontation, no explanation. Out of there.
I also
see again the blatant ageism in so many book reviews. It's as if
young aspiring writers think about the previous generations,
especially writers over 80, "how dare you continue to publish?"
and make gratuitous comments comparing this and earlier work, usually
including the words "familiar ground."
I sought
out Alice Munro's Nobel Prize video, 2013. She has made up stories
all her life, prompted in the beginning by a discontent with the existing fictional landscape, specifically with the plot, the denouement, in
Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. She wanted a different
ending for her heroines, for her own tales of the lives of girls and
women. She has been re-creating the narrative for our land and ourselves all her writing life.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2013/munro-lecture.pdf
