macCloud Falls

Robert Alan Jamieson

Luath Press, £14.99

Review by Richard Strachan

IN HIS last novel, 2010’s Da Happie Laand, Robert Alan Jamieson used the experience of emigration and immigration, of transported populations and transposed memories, to powerfully illuminate the colonial links between his native Shetland and New Zealand. Here, in a more subdued and meditative novel, he turns his attention to the ties that bind Scotland to Canada, another part of the 19th century imperial project and a country that proved fertile soil for enterprising Scots.

Gilbert Johnson is an antiquarian bookseller from Edinburgh, who has recently undergone gruelling treatment for cancer. With his perspective on life ruthlessly shaken by his disease, Gilbert decides to travel to British Columbia on the trail of James Lyle, a man who might have been his grandfather and who played a pivotal role in helping to establish First Nation rights in the early years of the 20th century. Loosely based on the historical figure of James Teit (Tate & Lyle?), Jimmy has left traces of his life around the small, former pioneer settlement of Cloud Falls. Haunted by the themes of John Buchan’s classic novel of illness and mortality, Sick Heart River, Gilbert travels to the small town with inchoate plans to write a book about Lyle. Whether this will be biography, history or fiction, or even a brooding form of memoir, is still to be determined though when he meets Veronika, a Czech-Canadian recovering from her own cancer treatment and trying to extricate herself from a bruising relationship with a married man. Concerned about Gilbert’s state of mind, Veronika finds herself staying with him while he researches Lyle’s history, interviewing locals and exploring landmarks that link the present to the century past, finding in Gilbert’s unobtrusive obsession and stoical perseverance a means of confronting her brush with mortality.

In Da Happie Laand, Jamieson presented the mutual cross-pollination of British colonialism through a sequence of recovered and intersecting manuscripts, from letters to newspaper articles, from personal reminiscences to official government reports. This palimpsest approach to the layering of history is a similar theme in macCloud Falls. Where the previous novel uses documents and manuscripts to illustrate this point though, macCloud Falls uses both the erasure and the reformation of names; if the First Nations people in Canada are fundamentally an oral culture, then it is in naming and toponymy that a settler culture imposes its values.

On one level this instability of naming is jovial and unimportant; Gilbert is variously known as Gil or Bert to his Canadian hosts, and there’s an extended joke about Veronika being mistaken for the actress Sigourney Weaver. But the deeper Jamieson goes in his book, the more the bestowing of names becomes a dubious business. Is Gilbert overstepping his bounds when he appropriates Veronika for a character in his memoir-cum-novel, calling her Martina both on the page and in the real world? Cloud Falls itself used to be know as MacLeod Falls, after John MacLeod, James Lyle’s uncle, who founded the community. Before that it was Sigurd’s Crossing, and by this point the original native Indian name has been erased several times over. But, as James thinks (or writes), ‘nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it’. The more he explores though, the more he realises that recovering memories is as much a political as a personal act, and in the sleepy community of Cloud Falls there still simmers an underlying racial tension between the First Nations people and the settler culture that replaced them. Even James Lyle’s seemingly altruistic recording of the First Nations’ myths and stories is a form of appropriation. "Every story," Gilbert thinks, "loses something when it’s translated, doesn’t it?" It’s only later that he realises how much of Lyle’s work was really informed by his native wife, Antko, another name erased from the legend.

Jamieson writes from an obviously intimate knowledge of Canada and its people, and although he isn’t blind to the country’s faults there is something idyllic, or edenic, about his picture of its shattering landscapes and isolated settlements. The relationship between Gilbert and Veronika is well portrayed, their shared experience of illness and mortality giving it a tentative quality that feels convincing, and although there’s not much of a narrative drive to the book, Jamieson’s contemplative, meandering pace reflects the uncertainty of his central characters and their sudden confrontation with the fragility of their lives. macCloud Falls is quieter and more careful than Jamieson’s previous novels, but it is perhaps a richer book for all that.