Interview: Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting

ALEXANDER MacLeod’s short stories are so powerful that they are even a match for those of his celebrated father. David Robinson talks to him

Get out a map of Canada and look at its long, long border. Imagine the hundreds of undistinguished miles it runs across the prairie or up and down the Rockies, or those unimaginable distances in the middle or rivers and lakes. At just one point in all of those thousands of miles that border is in a railway tunnel under a river, a tunnel with a Canadian city on one end and an American one just a mile away at the other.

If you’ve ever been to Canada or if you’re just good at geography, you’ll know where we are by now – that the American city is Detroit, the Canadian one Windsor, Ontario. This is where that interminable border has shoved so far south into the United States that this small stretch of Canada is miles south of Milwaulkee or Buffalo. It is also the setting for most of the stories in Alexander MacLeod’s debut collection Light Lifting, which has already made the shortlists of two of the most important literary awards in the world.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

His father Alistair is, of course, one of finest living practitioners of the form, right up there with Alice Munro and William Trevor, his melancholy-tinged stories of Cape Breton life both precise and universal – the kind that can, without any kind of showmanship or pulsing ego, quietly enfold the collective imagination of an audience and transport them across time and oceans. Though he is a modest man, Alistair MacLeod’s reputation and craft casts a long shadow. And that’s the dilemma of a writer who is a writer’s child. Do you really want to escape from under that shadow in the first place? Are you a good enough writer to even try? And even if you do, won’t everyone just think that you had it easy anyway, that your genes somehow gave you an unfair advantage?

That’s why I began with geography, with that rail tunnel under the river that is also a boundary between Canada and the United States, because that’s where Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting begins too. Windsor, Ontario, is a world away from Cape Breton: in a British context, the difference is like that between Birkenhead and Skye. That’s where we are in the first story, “Miracle Mile”, which tells the story of two top-class athletes – 1,500 metre runners good enough to make the national Olympics team. The narrator has probably just passed his peak; he has always beaten his friend Burner, but there is a dangerous rage about Burner. You can never write him off. The race they are preparing for, rooming together in some nondescript hotel, zoning out, trying to give their bodies every last bit of rest – that could be the race where Burner makes his breakthrough.

You don’t know any of this at the start of the story. It opens in that hotel room.

“This was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. You remember that. It was a moment in history – not like Kennedy or the planes flying into the World Trade Center – not up at that level. This was something lower, more like Ben Johnson, back when his eyes were that thick, yellow colour and he tested positive in Seoul after breaking the world record in the hundred…”

And already the story is up and running, and we are watching Tyson on his big comeback fight on the hotel TV, when he knew all the cameras were watching him but he just couldn’t help himself. Like a widening camera lens, we see Burner and the narrator. We don’t know what they are doing in that hotel room, so the lens opens some more and this time, magically, we get time as well as space. So we see that they are athletes, and we are shown how they started. How they would drive across from Windsor to Detroit, park the car, head into the tunnel, and run that dark underground mile, that mile when sometimes a train would rumble in the tunnel behind them, forever gaining on them, as they race death into Canada.

I don’t know about you, but at this stage I’m hooked. I know something bad is going to happen – that minatory Tyson image is just so strong – but don’t know what. It can’t be the train, because that was years ago. But I know it is going to be something to do with obsession, because MacLeod has taken us so completely into the athletes’ minds that you sense what they would do, what they would inject, how hard they would work out, how much they would cut themselves from ordinary life just to shave a second off their race times. And when you read the story, you see what else MacLeod has pared away from it – how the language isn’t weighted down with description, how the story can give a sudden kick and race off into unpredictability. Yet when you look at it again, you can see that even this unpredictable ending was somehow prefigured in the story’s opening sentences, that whatever happens will be to do with the consequences of obsession. It feels – like a truly good short story should – crafted, meant, complete. He’s his father’s son alright.

Alexander MacLeod is talking to me in the book-lined study of his house a mile away from the bridge to the harbour in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is professor of Canadian literature and creative writing at nearby St Mary’s University, and along with his wife and three children spends summers in a house next to his parents in Cape Breton. The family roots there go deep on both sides. “The MacLeods arrived in Canada in 1791 and settled permanently in our little corner of Cape Breton in 1806. The MacLellans on my mother’s side came in the 1820’s. In Scottish terms, I realise that 1791 doesn’t seem like that long ago, but it’s ancient history for Canada.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Windsor, Canada’s car-making capital, where his father taught English at university before his retirement and where he himself grew up – has fallen on almost as hard times as Detroit across the river. Of Windsor’s Big Three car plants, GM has closed, Ford has stopped making transmissions, but Chrysler is still grimly hanging on in a post-industrial city that could hardly be more different from Cape Breton. “It’s just a 21-hour car ride away,” laughs MacLeod.

When Light Lifting came out, his extended family in Cape Breton looked in vain for stories set in its still strongly Scottish Gaelic culture. “They knew I’d written Cape Breton stories. But it was a strategic choice on my publisher’s part. Because the odd thing about the Canadian canon is that the Maritimes – Cape Breton, New Brunswick, Newfoundland – actually have a much bigger position in it than the cities actually do. Writing about the industrial heart of Canada is relatively neglected.

“We’re the most urbanised country in the West, but you’d never know it to read Canadian literature. You’d never realise that 70 per cent of the population lives in just five cities. But this country is just so huge that the landscape exerts this amazing pressure on all writers.

“It’s the same with the weather. If you took plots that involve extreme weather out of Canadian literature, that would decimate it. Yet it’s real enough: as dad is always saying, this is a country in which, for four months of the year, if you have to spend a night outside, you will die. That’s not like Miami or Greece. Other things will happen there, but you will not die of exposure.”

The Windsor stories in Light Lifting are different: no extreme weather deaths, but plenty of insights into the wilder, sadder sides of the Canadian rustbelt. Like every writer you’ll ever meet, MacLeod is keen to emphasise that his stories aren’t just slightly distorted slices of his own life recast as fiction, although he admits that several have an autobiographical kernel. The 21-hour car journey – complete with sick child – has echoes in one story, his first job as a brickie’s mate in another. And then there’s the tunnel and the running in “Miracle Mile”.

“Running against a train?” I ask. “Are you crazy?” “We never did it the way they do in the story – going over to the States and running back through the tunnel. We did it in what I think is an even scarier way – going into the tunnel from the Canadian side and coming back. I mean, at least the guys in the story would have had some notion of when the trains were running, but we would just go into the tunnels with no notion of what might be coming our way.”

He has, he adds, always run. Even when he was 12, the year his father took his family to live in Edinburgh, he was already running 800 and 1,500 metres on the course spraypainted on the grass at Broughton school. Now he is 40, he still runs about 60 miles a week. When the news came through that Light Lifting had made it to the shortlist of Canada’s prestigious Giller prize (it also made it last year to the shortlist of the Frank O’Connor prize, the world’s biggest for short stories) that’s where he was, pounding through the woods at the back of his house.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Finally, I ask the obvious question, the one about the extent his father has influenced his writing. “My father is a great teacher, though he has never sat down and taught me. But the care with which he works on the words, their rhythm and sounds, is amazing, and I try to get the same kind of discipline into my work. All of my siblings – all six of us – got that lesson not in a formal way, but in a way that was quiet and modest and lived, the lesson that work is serious, and you always approach it with your best energy. I try to encourage my students to work that way too.”

But serious work takes serious time. Like his father, Alexander MacLeod is a perfectionist. His father’s reputation stems from just 13 short stories and one novel; his son’s first collection contains only seven stories, one of which was written as long as 17 years ago. They are not prolific, these MacLeods. But – trust me – when they do get around to producing a book, you really ought to have a look at it.

• Light Lifting, by Alexander MacLeod, is published this week by Jonathan Cape, price £14.99. He will also be appearing at the Ullapool Book Festival, 11-13 May

Related topics: