The View from Castle Rock
by Alice Munro
Vintage, HK$132
In what could be her last book, Alice Munro has written about her not especially interesting family in a way that makes them seem particularly fascinating. Fact and a shrewd imagination form the different strata of The View from Castle Rock, which traces the journey of Munro's forebears from Ettrick Valley in Scotland to rural Ontario, where she spent her formative years. A master of short stories, Munro splits her collection in two. The first half, containing first-person essay-type anecdotes, is the less effective for reasons that sometimes blight historical fiction: that which is made up sits uncomfortably with the documented. Helped by journals written by family chroniclers, Munro's 'memoir' sees a boy, Andrew Laidlaw, gazing across the water from Edinburgh's Castle Rock to America. 'There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties,' says his father who, in 1818, boarded a ship with his family, leaving Scotland behind. Part two is the more compelling perhaps because Munro explores 'a life, my own life' in its stories. By recalling her past, she also vividly paints other family members, including her father, a fox farmer damaged by the Great Depression. True to form, Munro uses authentic description to collar and entertain readers.
