Little Red Boy

Elizabeth Lowry

• Island: Collected Stories by Alistair MacLeod
  Cape, 434 pp, £16.99, June 2001, ISBN 0 224 06194 1
• No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
  Vintage, 262 pp, £6.99, June 2001, ISBN 0 09 928392 1

Alistair MacLeod is a Canadian of Scottish descent, and, like John McGahern who has written a foreword to his collected stories, an astute observer of a very specific local setting – Cape Breton, Nova Scotia; of its landscape and industry, its closed communities, quotidian tragedies and domestic disappointments. In addition, both McLeod’s voice and McGahern’s are recognisably inflected, in certain patterned stresses, by a common Gaelic linguistic inheritance. MacLeod needs McGahern to introduce him because, unlike McGahern, he was, until recently, still a writer with a small, loyal following at home, rather than an international reputation. In thirty years he has produced two volumes of short stories (these, together with two uncollected stories, make up this new book, Island) and one novel, a slender body of work that has only recently begun to attract a wider readership.