The View from Castle Rock – Alice Munro

True Stories

The View from Castle Rock
Alice Munro
McClelland & Stewart, 2006
368 pages, $34.99

Putting aside the obvious fact that the “world of the self” is a realm from which great writers have always created great works of fiction, both of these reviews betray a sentiment which appears to be finding some favour of late, namely a questioning of Munro’s lofty status, a certain impatience with her position as an unassailable icon. It makes sense to state from the outset that any such doubting of Munro’s achievement doesn’t find favour here. For this reader, fiction is first and foremost about aesthetic pleasure, the thrill of experiencing language which conjures living worlds, and on that score few deliver the goods better than Munro. Yes, her protagonists are all of a similar background, and her focus on the world of female experience is largely unrelenting, but so what? Munro’s fiction is always rich with implication, charged by suspense and psychological insight, vividly evocative of time and place, suggestive of moral truth but never didactic.

Part fiction, part history, part memoir, The View from Castle Rock resists easy categorization. An audacious and innovative work (though not without Canadian precursors; Resident Alien by Clark Blaise comes to mind), the book is a study of identity through fiction, a searching of a self on various levels: historical, cultural, familial, and geographical. The book’s unusual structure and subversion of expectations has resulted in a mixed critical reception, a broad spectrum of responses ranging from the usual high praise down to blunt pronouncements that the old master had finally, after all these years, bestowed upon her audience a less than stellar volume. Alex Good, writing in Quill & Quire, placed the book in the category of “family history,” equating it to a “retirement project,” and concluded by speculating that “Munro’s great mythic ground . . . may finally be written out.” The Globe and Mail offered a rather bizarre review which devoted almost a third of its column inches to questioning the basis of Munro’s entire oeuvre, asking “why always . . . this insistent choice of the purely personal, the proximate world of the self and its near relations?” Difficult to believe, but at this late stage it’s apparently news to the Globe and reviewer Lydia Millet that Alice Munro is not Charles Dickens.

Putting aside the obvious fact that the “world of the self” is a realm from which great writers have always created great works of fiction, both of these reviews betray a sentiment which appears to be finding some favour of late, namely a questioning of Munro’s lofty status, a certain impatience with her position as an unassailable icon. It makes sense to state from the outset that any such doubting of Munro’s achievement doesn’t find favour here. For this reader, fiction is first and foremost about aesthetic pleasure, the thrill of experiencing language which conjures living worlds, and on that score few deliver the goods better than Munro. Yes, her protagonists are all of a similar background, and her focus on the world of female experience is largely unrelenting, but so what? Munro’s fiction is always rich with implication, charged by suspense and psychological insight, vividly evocative of time and place, suggestive of moral truth but never didactic.

One’s response to her new book will likely turn on one’s opinion of the nature of Munro’s project. At best, The View from Castle Rock is a brilliant reimagining of fiction and history’s complementary relationship, shedding new light on Munro’s earlier work. At worst, it is an uneven collection, with a few subpar efforts mixed in amongst several excellent stories. If, like Good, one regards the book as a self-indulgent family history project, then its larger structure, as well as most of the stories in the first section, will be of little interest. However, if one sees it as a writer’s ambitious attempt to come to terms with her past, to reconcile fiction and history and assert her own place within that history, then a kind of arc to the otherwise awkward structure of the book becomes visible. There is a cumulative effect within this collection, a coalescing of past and present that is both moving and aesthetically satisfying. Which is not to say the book is without problems.

At first reading the two main parts of The View from Castle Rock appear to have little in common. The opening set of stories, “No Advantages,” draws on genealogical research undertaken by Munro into her father’s family, the Laidlaws, whose history stretches back several generations into the lore of early 18th-century Scotland. Munro devotes some twenty pages to the factual results of her investigations, essentially listing and describing several notable ancestors. Together with an expendable preface, the opening pieces have, from an editorial standpoint, been poorly handled. In fact, the first twenty-five pages could be the dreariest Munro has ever published. The impatient reader is further tried by the first work of fiction in the book, the title story, which chronicles the Laidlaws’ ocean crossing in 1818. Intriguing it is to see an established author taking risks, moving outside of the scope of her usual territory, but “The View from Castle Rock,” never quite coalesces into a compelling narrative. One is not persuaded of the verisimilitude of this voyage. With a large cast of family members involved, there are simply too many competing points of view for the reader to identify with any one character and Munro fails to convincingly capture the atmosphere of the ship, to integrate the physical details required to bring this imaginary environment to life.

The two subsequent stories also draw on Munro’s genealogical research and incorporate passages from old documents. “Illinois” depicts the journey taken from that state into Canada by the family of Munro’s great-great grandfather. “The Wilds of Morris Township” focuses on the children of her great-great-uncle, none of whom married but instead lived together on a modest farm, isolated from the surrounding community. The first three stories then are historical speculations, limited in their aesthetic and emotional power. In contrast to how similar material is approached in earlier stories – for example, “The Wilds of Morris Township” or “Wilderness Station” – Munro is less interested in taking historical liberties to create compelling fiction than in recreating something like the real, possible truth of these people’s lives, something less dramatic perhaps, but closer to what may have actually taken place. By attempting to be more faithful to historical truth, she wishes to assert a meaningful connection with people long dead, as if to say, “this is all a part of who I am; these are the people and events that lead up to me.” The difficulty is that her attempt to connect herself to the dead becomes poignant only as we move through the latter parts of the book. Taken on their own, these stories simply lack the richness and complexity we have come to expect from Munro. The exception is “Working for a Living,” tellingly the only story here drawing on her own life. A moving portrait of her father, Robert Laidlaw, the story details his career as trapper and failed fur farmer, and then later as a janitor at a foundry. Munro has written about the fox farm before, in such stories as “Boys and Girls,” but never in such detail. And never before has her father emerged as such an engaging and memorable character. In fact, he becomes a central figure in the book, appearing in three of the stories, and referred to in others.

If most of the stories in “No Advantages” are emotionally distanced, the stories in “Home,” the book’s second section, are as intense and absorbing as anything Munro has written. At least four of the six stories form a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a depiction of her isolation within her family and how literature became her solace and refuge. The need for escape from a world of stoicism and self-denial suffuses these stories. Even those which centre on a mature protagonist – a divorced mother visiting her father and step-mother in “Home;” a middle-aged woman confronting mortality in “What Do You Want to Know For?” – these stories also reinforce the image of Munro as an outsider, an exile, someone who had to leave her family and its world with an emotional finality no less profound than it must be for those who emigrate to another continent.

The rural Protestant world of which she cannot remain a part is starkly portrayed as rigid and oppressive. The first section of the book is primarily a portrait through fiction of the author’s ancestors, but it is also an attempt to understand how her own family was shaped, the wellspring of this proud and emotionally distanced temperament. The people who survived the hardships described in the earlier stories lay the foundation for the culture from which the young Munro must escape. For a girl as sensitive, spirited, and precocious as she evidently was, the narrow world of Souwesto Scotch Calvinism was stifling, even dangerous. In Munro’s version of rural WASP society, a society now fast disappearing, judgement and condemnation is a constant threat. From a young age she understood the hazards of drawing attention to herself, the steep price to be paid for openly expressing one’s thoughts or emotions: “Self-dramatization got short shrift in our family. Though now that I come to think of it, it wasn’t exactly that word they used. They spoke of calling attention. Calling attention to yourself.”

Avid readers of Alice Munro are already aware of the difficulty of growing up in a rural, WASP household in a culturally conservative region, but now she places the characteristics of that time and area within a specific historical context. The connection being made is obvious enough: if the Laidlaws were hard, judgemental people, it is the result of what her ancestors faced, how they coped and what they passed on. In the story “Hired Girl,” a young Munro demonstrates an understanding of the context for this threat of judgement and censure when she is asked by a fellow maid what kind of sports her family plays. The reply is that they don’t play sports at all, that leisure activity is virtually unknown. “What do they do then?” asks the curious peer. The opportunity to translate experience into storytelling, to express herself through imaginative language, proves irresistible:

Then I told her that most people I knew had never seen a flush toilet unless it was in a public building and that sometimes old people (that is, people too old to work) had to stay in bed all winter in order to keep warm. Children walked barefoot until the frost came in order to save on shoe leather, and died of stomach aches that were really appendicitis because their parents had no money for a doctor. Sometimes people had eaten dandelion leaves, nothing else, for supper.

As this embellishment suggests, “Hired Girl” is the story that explores the theme of an artist’s development most directly, showing her beginning to search for a way to cope with her alienation. As the story progresses we see the young artist moving tentatively towards her vocation: the compulsion to reimagine what she knows, to embellish the truth; the sensitivity to others; the close observation of human behaviour; the attraction to “gothic tales.” There are numerous references to her reading magazines and stories, another activity which she feels she must conceal from others or be prepared to justify. Her position as an outsider and an observer is further emphasized by the nature of her work at the guesthouse, her being apart from people who are swimming or relaxing on the patio with drinks and food served to them.

“The Ticket” also deals with the need for escape from one’s roots, though now the protagonist is an adult, engaged and readying herself for married life. On one level the story is an examination of the marriages that Munro knew of growing up, those of her parents, grandparents and her great-aunt. The deeper story is of a young woman who has yet to find the right way to free herself, who has yet to believe she is capable of measuring up to her secret artistic aspirations.

She is preparing to marry a man from outside the community, and the members of her family appear indifferent – not only in regards to the groom, but in regards to her relocation to the other side of the continent. In fact, the family enjoys teasing her about the wedding, intimating a fear that if something should happen to the prospective groom, the protagonist will be doomed to spinsterhood. The “ticket” is marriage, and the term is used by Aunt Charlie who has made her niece’s wedding dress and, in the process of fitting it, patiently answers questions that betray the typical uncertainties. But the older woman (significantly, the only person the protagonist knows who had a happy marriage, who was actually “fond” of her husband), in the course of offering counsel and explanations – perhaps briefly functioning as the kind of mother Munro never had – sees something else in the young bride. In the midst of the fitting, with the dress itself taking on larger and larger implications, Aunt Charlie abruptly thrusts a fistful of cash at her niece. “If you don’t want to get married,” she says, “you’ll need some money to get away.” And a moment later: “It might not be just the right ticket for you.” No, the reader thinks, it clearly is not. What she needs is a different kind of ticket altogether, a ticket out – out of her family and her foredoomed marriage, out from her past, and into a new life only she can imagine, the life of an exile.

In the remaining stories, the protagonist is older and mortality looms. “Home” centres on the woman’s relationship with her father, now remarried, aging and beginning to experience ill-health. With her father in the hospital, she must help with daily tasks, including caring for the sheep. Alone, spreading hay in the dim barn, she feels the weight of the past and discerns a kinship with those who have been wounded and defeated by the environment she managed to escape.

Time and place can close in on me, it can so easily seem as if I have never got away, that I have stayed here my whole life. As if my life as an adult was some kind of dream that never took hold of me. I see myself . . . like one of those misfits, captives – nearly useless, celibate, rusting – who should have left but didn’t, couldn’t, and are now unfit for any place. . . . I can see myself as a middle-aged daughter who did her duty, stayed at home, thinking that someday her chance would come, until she woke up and knew it wouldn’t. Now she reads all night and doesn’t answer her door, and comes out in a surly trance to spread hay for the sheep.

Even in the midst of what might be called gratitude for having “got away,” she still notes with regret the changes at the home, things lost or transformed – the red brick of the house covered with aluminium, the remembered kitchen chairs discarded. And in “What Do You Want to Know For?” the protagonist, still older, coping with her own medical concerns, indulges her fascination for learning as much as possible about the history of her home region; the outsider, having outlasted those she left behind, now seeks some kind of reconnection with her origins. This compulsion is irresistible, though the satisfaction to be obtained appears fleeting at best, perhaps illusory. Such links to her past are of course the central preoccupation of this book, and the principal answer to the title question of its last story. But moments of contact with history and family have a cost. Throughout “What Do You Want to Know For?” the narrator, who now lives not far from where she grew up, must endure the shocking knowledge of a small, suspicious lump in her breast and the frustration of waiting for test results and appointments. This brush with death and the need to cope with the empty time between examinations drive her to research the existence of a strange crypt not far from her home. It takes her and her husband days to find it, days spent driving, asking questions of various people, poring over maps and atlases, before they finally discover where it is and how it came to be. In the midst of this investigation they meet a man who had known Munro’s family decades before, who had once worked with her father when she was an infant. The narrator tells us she is pleased to have found this person, “somebody who can see me still as part of my family, who can remember my father and the place where my parents worked.” A place, she notes, that she seldom visits even though it’s only twenty miles away.

And what of that place, the old farm from which she eventually “got away” and where her father lived out his last healthy years? Munro waits until this unexpected connection is established before disclosing that the farm is now “a car-wrecking operation,” waits until she can juxtapose the sentiment of the encounter with this brutally ugly description of irrevocable loss, of what has been done to the narrator’s past:

The front yard and the side yard and the vegetable garden and the flower borders, the hayfield, the mock-orange bush, the lilac trees, the chestnut stump, the pasture and the ground once covered by the fox pens, are all swept under a tide of car parts, gutted car bodies, smashed headlights, grilles, and fenders, overturned car seats with rotten bloated stuffing – heaps of painted, rusted, blackened, glittering, whole or twisted, defiant and surviving metal.

Similarly, in the epilogue, she laments the destruction of the old houses and farms to make room for the new barns, “as long as city blocks,” and “as forbidding and secretive as penitentiaries,” where animals are “raised in the efficient and profitable modern way,” noting that the land is left lonelier for it, desolate. (And how, one wants to ask Lydia Millet, is this not dealing with matters beyond the “purely personal”?)

The epilogue though is chiefly concerned with the continuation of Munro’s genealogical investigations, a pursuit which takes her back to Illinois, rummaging in libraries and through old, forgotten graveyards. The search is never-ending, frustrations and seeming dead ends inevitably leading to new questions, new possible lines of inquiry. Contemplating a tantalizing clue found in an overgrown graveyard, she reflects:

I could pursue this. It’s what people do. Once they get started they’ll follow any lead. . . . It happens mostly in our old age, when our personal futures close down and we cannot imagine – sometimes cannot believe in – the future of our children’s children. We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.

In the end, what gives this book its emotional power and works to evoke the cumulative effect I mentioned earlier, is the larger search behind it. The image of Alice Munro, at this late stage of her life, scrambling through “almost impenetrable undergrowth” to grope amongst decaying tombstones in a forgotten graveyard, is a poignant sight. The View from Castle Rock is much more than a “purely personal” book, or a self-indulgent “family history.” To the contrary, it attempts to evoke both the universal search for meaning and identity, as well as the emotional urgency of that pursuit for the cultural exile. And while recognizing the collection contains a few weaker stories, by book’s end I would not want them removed; edited more ruthlessly perhaps, but not eliminated. The significance of those stories is amplified once the reader can connect them to Munro’s larger quest.

The effectiveness of the later stories and of the epilogue, however, do not completely make up for the missteps at the book’s beginning. At the very least, Munro should have refrained from including the book’s foreword where she attempts to remedy any confusion as to whether the reader can expect to encounter fiction, history, or a memoir – in other words, a kind of spoon-feeding exercise. “These are stories,” states Munro in, one imagines, a somewhat exasperated tone. In my opinion, the reader should have been left alone to confront this innovative work on its own terms. Munro is one of the indisputably great literary artists of the last thirty years or more, and artists do well never to explain themselves, at least not within the fencelines of their work. Can one imagine, say, Ingmar Bergman beginning a film by explaining to what degree it is autobiographical and why he structured it the way he did?

Besides, surely the book’s title is meant to highlight the simple fact that as readers we should be aware of the storyteller’s penchant for exaggeration, for altering facts and history to suit dramatic purposes. The title story centres on the Laidlaws’ ocean crossing, but before the voyage is undertaken, Munro imagines a scene in which an inebriated James Laidlaw takes his son and drinking mates up the long climb to the top of a stone tower in Edinburgh Castle, to gaze across the ocean at the New World.

The sun was out now, shining on the stone heap of houses and streets below them, and the churches whose spires did not reach to this height, and some little trees and fields, then a wide silvery stretch of water. And beyond that a pale green and grayish-blue land, part in sunlight and part in shadow, a land as light as mist, sucked into the sky.

“So did I not tell you?” Andrew’s father said. “America. It is only a little bit of it, though, only the shore. There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties, and even the beggars is riding around in carriages.”

“Well the sea does not look so wide as I thought,” said the man who had stopped staggering. “It does not look as if it would take you weeks to cross it.”

“It is the effect of the height we’re on,” said the man who stood beside Andrew’s father. “The height we’re on is making the width of it the less.”

In other words it is a rare perspective, this view from the castle rock, one that subverts when it pleases space and time, history and facts, and, if need be, can turn the coast of Fife into America. It is a performance of language and rhetoric, voice and image, a performance intended to beguile and illuminate. Why spoil it by worrying if it is all “true”?

Tags: Issue 75

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