The View From Castle Rock (review)

Reviewed by: The View From Castle Rock Sara Jamieson Alice Munro . The View From Castle Rock. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006. 349 pp. $34.99 hc. In Other Solitudes, Linda Hutcheon stresses the necessity of recognizing the ethnicity of even a "mainstream" Canadian writer like Alice Munro (15). To ignore the specifically Scots-Irish element of Munro's work is to risk complicity with the hierarchy of privilege through which the dominant culture in English Canada has maintained its dominance by labeling others as "ethnic." Recently, Munro scholars have begun to address issues of ethnicity in her stories by focusing on the complexities of her engagement with Scottish-Canadian history and culture. Munro's latest collection of stories, The View From Castle Rock, provides ample material for readers interested in this particular aspect of her work. The book represents Munro's most sustained inquiry to date into the history of her father's family, the Laidlaws. Castle Rock mixes excerpts from old Laidlaw documents with invention and memoir in order to reconstruct the story of the family's departure from Scotland in 1818, their trans-Atlantic voyage, and their own and their descendants' attempts to make a living in Huron County, Ontario. The title story exposes and critiques the process through which communities mobilize discourses of ethnicity and nation in order to maintain a sense of superiority over other groups. Prior to their departure from Scotland, the Laidlaws proclaim themselves "men of the Ettrick" (31), a valley "occupied for a long time by a mix of people" — Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Norse, and Picts (4). In the unfamiliar surroundings of the immigrant ship, however, the Laidlaws abandon this local and heterogeneous identity to position themselves instead as "Scotsmen and decent folk," an allegiance that excludes "Highlanders" and "Irish" and anyone else they perceive as different and threatening to their newly-adopted identity (32). The story thus makes visible the multiple ethnicities that are suppressed in the creation of fictions of national "purity," and emphasizes the plurality that, in Canadian culture, has been masked by homogenizing terms like "British" and "WASP." [End Page 225] The book replicates a pattern common to many stories of immigration, that of the trajectory of a family's progress, over several generations, toward the attainment of a contemporary Canadian identity. Munro's rewriting of this narrative questions the assumptions about success, progress, and nation in which it appears to be grounded. The descendents of immigrants in this text never seem to arrive at any uncomplicated sense of being Canadian, but instead retain their allegiance to older, ethnic identities that are never as simple as they seem. Munro's stepmother attributes her equal measures of humour and belligerence at first to being "Irish," but adds that these qualities are equally attributable to her having been "born on a train" (293). Similarly, Munro herself responds to her ancestor Margaret Laidlaw's refusal to be impressed by what Sir Walter Scott made of the ballads she transmitted to him with the comment that "Scots are like that" (22). This is immediately qualified, however, with the more specific "My family was like that." Such equivocation posits an identity that is not reducible to ethnicity or nationality alone, but is always mediated by other factors, especially class. The immigrants' first view of the forests of Nova Scotia seems to confirm their idea of the New World as a place of abundance for all, unlike the vanished "Royal Forest of Ettrick," once the protected hunting ground of the kings of Scotland (66). If the immigrants see in the landscape their freedom from oppressive Old-World class constraints, their descendant Munro learns a humiliating lesson about the extent to which those constraints endure: during her teenage stint as a maid for a wealthy family at their cottage on Georgian Bay, the orderly and fragrant forest seems to her naturally to belong to "rich people," to be "their proper though somber playground" (232). The way in which these three forests play off one another is one example of the layered complexity with which the book complicates the narrative of immigrant experience that it appears to evoke, in which hard work facilitates the exchange of poverty...

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