The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro

Review:marjory kempe

If only James Frey had been as honest and eloquent as Alice Munro in describing what a fictionalized memoir is. In the foreword to A View from Castle Rock, Munro explains how writing this collection of stories and historical narrative was a means for her to explore her own life. Beginning with, but not bound to the facts, Munro writes that "some of these characters have moved so far from the beginnings that I cannot remember who they were to start with." The book falls into two parts. The first, "No Advantages," sums up her family's history in the Ettrick Valley. Munro begins in this boggy, hilly part of Scotland with a straightforward account of the region's history and a visit to the local graveyard. Here we meet the characters to whom she will later add flesh and blood, so to speak. She makes them live by telling their stories in the present tense and using a simple, lilting prose that matches the oral story-telling tradition. Will Laidlaw is first, a larger-than-life character from the end of the seventeenth century renowned for both his tremendous physical abilities and his uncanny meetings with spirits. Munro moves down the generations in a somewhat stark yet revealing summary until she reaches Andrew Laidlaw, at which point the folk narrative dissolves into a proper Munro story. The remainder of the first portion continues in this way, intertwining Munro’s fictionalized version of the Laidlaw saga with historical commentary and even quotations from letters, tombstones, and journals. She was rather fortunate to have so much information to work with, having pleasantly discovered that every generation of her family had produced at least one prolific letter-writer or journalist. The second section, "Home," is Munro at perhaps her bravest. The stories are not strict autobiography, but they do follow so closely her own experiences that the reader cannot know where Munro ends and the fiction begins. All the stories are in the first person and begin with more or less the same family group--Munro's own family.

It's a rural family precariously balancing the line between lower middle class and working poor; consequently, social expectations are a constant undercurrent. The mother suffers the humiliation and bewilderment of long-undiagnosed Parkinson's disease, and the clever father with his marginal fox farm and foundry job bears the faint scent of failure. Curiously, of the three children, two are non-characters. The brother is only referred to in the briefest way and the younger sister appears only occasionally as a contrast to her sister’s peculiar attachment to nature and other unconventional views. This sister is the narrator and protagonist of the stories, and she must be, to some extent, Munro herself. The stories are arranged in a loose chronological order, jumping from the disappointments of first relationships with friends and boyfriends, to a farm girl's first job as a maid on Georgian Bay, to a young woman’s discovery of her family's romantic past just as she plans to desert it through her own marriage. The last two stories explore end-of-life issues as the narrator faces first her father's mortality and then, in a brush with cancer, her own. People have often said of skilled writers that it is impossible to believe that their characters never actually lived and breathed. With Alice Munro's accounts of her family, brought to life with her spare, accurate rendering, it is impossible to believe that they no longer live. The stories have an intimacy that history lacks without detracting from their historical context. They make you wonder what your own family might have been up to three hundred years ago.
The View from Castle Rock Originally published in Shvoong: http://www.shvoong.com/books/novel-novella/487372-view-castle-rock/