Alistair MacLeod's two collections of short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986), have earned him much-deserved praise as one of Canada's great, if largely unknown, writers. Traditional in both style and subject matter, MacLeod's thematically complex stories explore familial relationships as they are shaped by numinous Celtic myth and the natural world. The 14 often hauntingly exquisite stories bear numerous rereadings. They also provoke readers to imagine, as Joyce Carol Oates does in an afterword to MacLeod's first collection, that virtually any one of them might be expanded into a novel.

No Great Mischief is MacLeod's first and, in some circles, long-awaited novel, and it tells a story that will be deeply familiar to his readers. A first-person male narrator, defined primarily by his identity as son, grandson and brother, struggles to understand his Cape Breton Gaelic heritage as it has been cemented by the dubious joint acts of memory and storytelling. Alexander MacDonald is a successful southern Ontario orthodontist, one in his family's vast collection of “Alexanders,” and better known throughout the novel as gille bhig ruaidh—“little red-haired boy.” Almost all of the novel's action occurs in Alexander's memory during the 13 minutes or so he spends deciding what kind of liquor to bring back to his eldest brother, Calum, a former miner living out his alcoholic days in the seedy rooming houses of Toronto's west end.

By this device, the novel tackles history's inexplicable repetitions and reversals and the apparently ordinary forms of life-shaping tragedy. Its greatest strengths are its brief, unforgettable narrative images. In one early episode, Alexander remembers what he knows of his parents' drowning when he was only three:

By the time they were halfway across, it was dusk and out there on the ice they lit their lanterns, and that too was seen from the shore. And then they continued on their way. Then the lanterns seemed to waver and almost to dance wildly, and one described an arc in what was now the darkness and then was still. Grandpa watched for almost a minute to be sure of what he was seeing and then he shouted to my grandmother, “There is something wrong out on the ice. There is only one light and it is not moving.”

Similar descriptions bring the narrator's robustly sexual grandparents, his exactly opposite grandfathers, the loyal mare Christy, and Calum's unconventional tooth extraction to life. “Once we sang to the pilot whales on a summer's day,” he recalls, the second time he tells the story, near the novel's conclusion. “Perhaps we lured the huge whale in beyond his safe depth. And he died, disembowelled by the sharp rocks he could not see. Later his body moved inland, but his great heart remained behind.” The narrator's one direct conversation with Calum about the loss at the novel's core acts with a similarly subtle poignancy:

“Oh well,” Calum sighed, looking out the window at the jagged rocks and mangled trees, “too many bodies and too many wars. I often think it ironic that our father came through the war unscathed only to die beneath the ice at the end of a sunny March day.”

“Yes,” I said, “If you had been with them you would have gone down too.”

“I look at it differently,” he said. “If I had been with them I might have saved them.”

Enigmatic qualities in MacLeod's short fiction provoke us to imagine extended, elaborated, even epic possibilities. The novel, by contrast, is dulled by repetitions of words, phrases, images and ideas that never accrue the significance their sheer numbers imply. Mysterious invocations and recognitions of clan identity over continents and generations should make for resonant, eerie reading. It is therefore regrettable and surprising that the novel leaves no room for mystery or surprise: it tells us everything we need to know.

Members of clann Chalum Ruaidh have red or black hair and recognize one another no matter where in the world they are; Alexander's grandfathers are almost exactly opposite to each other but both men's qualities are necessary in the life of a family and a community; Alexander's orthodontic work makes people beautiful on the outside but doesn't change their inner selves; Alexander's sister's luxurious Calgary house can't compensate for distance from her family; young Calum internalizes the trauma of his parents' deaths, runs wild, acquires highly regarded mining skills, but eventually kills a man, goes to jail and becomes an alcoholic; Grandma speaks in clichés. Again and again.

There are arguments for the usefulness of an imperceptive narrator, but none of them apply here—No Great Mischief is too deeply flawed by its narrator's limited insight. Unlike the narrators of MacLeod's stories, Alexander learns almost nothing from the patterns he observes and enacts. The gille bhig ruaidh (a phrase that recurs with a frequency only an actual oral telling could justify) fails to do justice to the fragments which he eventually gathers into a chronicle. Although he manages to account for the wasted alcoholic pining for Cape Breton from his rundown room, Alexander never manages to make us care about him.

Much of MacLeod's short fiction explores the ways in which storytelling maintains identity, family history and ethnic memory. In this longer work, he overtly invokes oral storytelling qualities whose lulling effects on the reader belie the hard truth at the narrative's core: small tragedies resonate wrackingly through lifetimes and generations. Unlike his haunting and allusive earlier writing, his novel's ultimately numbing repetitions betray a deeply disappointing misalignment of story and form.