Scottish book with Cape Breton roots
Main character of Man Booker Prize nominee from Broad Cove, Inverness County
I knew in advance our moment was coming.
I may have let out a small yip anyway when I reached line 25 in the House of Anansi Press Inc. edition of the Man Booker Prize shortlisted “The Long Take.” Because at that point, after reading of “the fabled, smoking ruin,” “the ranked array of ivory and gold,” and the “black wetness of streets trashed and empty,” I found myself, “Back there in Broad Cove, on the island.”
Is it a tell that I come from a small place that I delight in those surprise moments when our presence is noted in some book, movie or song?
I don’t mean by artists formed by living in this place among these people, or in works set here because of storyline or subject matter.
No, I mean Carly Simon, who may have no idea that a generation of East Coast kids joined in whenever she sang on the radio how the anonymous adulterer in “You’re So Vain” flew their “Lear jet up to Nova Scotia, to see the total eclipse of the sun.”
I mean the newscaster in the environmental disaster flick “The Day After Tomorrow” who, years ago, thrilled my young daughter by gravely intoning, “In Nova Scotia today, the ocean rose by 25 feet.”
I mean Brad Pitt and the others fleeing the zombie apocalypse in World War Z, causing my son and his buddies to break into applause in a Halifax movie theatre upon learning that the survivors were safe, at least for the time being, at Freeport on the end of Digby Neck, Long Island, thought to be too isolated for even the undead to reach.
It is sort of sad that I liked the Netflix series Peaky Blinders, but I liked it more when the main guy, a gangster in Manchester, U.K., announced that he was running his whiskey through “Halifax, Nova Scotia.”
On the other hand, I’m not so sure I would have ploughed through “The Surgeon’s Mate,” book seven in Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin series, had it not opened with the HMCS Shannon sailing into “the long harbour of Halifax in Nova Scotia on a long, long summer’s day” after “short and bloody action with the Chesapeake.”
Nova Scotia does more than make a cameo appearance in “The Long Take.” That’s not why I read this dazzling work anyway.
The author, the acclaimed Scottish poet Robin Robertson, told me Wednesday that he wanted, for a change, to write something longform and narrative in nature.
He also wanted to turn his mind to big cities, although not the one he calls home, London, where his day job is as an editor at Jonathan Cape, where he publishes, among others, Michael Ondaatje.
Instead Robertson chose to write about the most interesting period in the history of North America’s metropolises: “the postWorld War Two collapse of the American Dream.”
And to create a main character haunted by the horrors of what he saw and did in the war. Walker, his D-Day vet, is an outsider wandering dazed through big city United States, which means that he feels some of the alienation that the author himself felt decades ago, leaving backwaterish Scotland for London.
Such a character, Robertson thought, should be a rural Canadian, adrift — like a Scot in London — in the crowded land to the South.
Walker, in other words, could have come from the Saskatchewan countryside. He came from Broad Cove, Inverness County, Robertson says, “because of Alistair.”
He means Alistair with the surname MacLeod, who taught Robertson creative writing at the University of Windsor when he landed there, mid-70s, “on some kind of scholarship.”
Since then Robertson, back then also MacLeod’s teaching assistant, kept in touch with Cape Breton’s most fabled writer, whom he remembers as “more Scottish than the Scots”. He published MacLeod’s single novel “No Great Mischief,” in the United Kingdom. He tells me that he will also publish his son Alexander, the Saint Mary’s University professor and critically acclaimed author, if he ever finishes the novel Robertson is waiting for.
So, it made perfect sense that the lead character in “The Long Take” would come from the place that the MacLeods have written so often about, in Robertson’s words, “a clean and softened land, fluent and dazzling down the ocean’s slate.”
He wrote Walker as “almost a blank” an observer through which we see things unfold as he criss-crosses America. Along the way we learn things about him: That he likes a drink, that he has difficulty showing his emotions, that he is slow to anger but when he does you know it.
Most of all that he is damaged goods, a member of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders suffering from a “psychic wound” and “deep shame “over his experiences in France after the D-Day invasion.
Robertson’s work is subtitled “A Noir Narrative,” and in keeping with the hallmarks of that filmmaking style, is sprinkled with flashbacks: Dark ones of the war and light, airy ones of an idealized Cape Breton and Annie, “the beatified woman” he left behind, which symbolized all that he could never hope to recover.
Alistair MacLeod, of course, romanticized Cape Breton too. Robertson owes his old teacher more than that.
“What he instilled in me is the importance of rooting the work in reality,” he said. “The need for verisimilitude, accuracy. If you tell the truth, at some basic level the reader is going to believe you.”
So he watched 400-500 film noir movies to get the style, the dialogue and the general mood right. He recreated the now-gone Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles, where much of the book takes place.
In the early summer of 2015 Robertson spent a week on the western end of Cape Breton exploring the cliffs and lanes of Inverness County, where MacLeod used to write his finely tuned prose in a hand-built shed overlooking the ocean.
Robertson had never been there before. He told me that at the B&B where he stayed in Margaree Harbour the proprietor asked what brought him to those parts.
So Robertson explained in detail his connection to MacLeod, who had died the year before.
It turned out that the owner knew all about it. In the way things work around here, he was Alastair MacLeod’s cousin.