Product Description

At nineteen, Innis Corbett is transplanted from his home near Boston and suddenly finds himself back in the remote Cape Breton community where he was born, the reluctant and unwelcome guest of his uncle Starr. Innis had developed an addiction for stealing expensive cars (not for money but for pleasure) and for the marijuana he helps his best friend to sell. When bad habits catch up with him, he is deported to Canada, a punishment worse than prison.

Innis is unimpressed by his uncle, who gave up his dreams of leaving the island to repair televisions, chase women, drive a Lada and grow nostalgic on rum. Desperate to get away, Innis hatches the only escape plan he can, and starts to grow a secret cash crop of marijuana and looks for a car to steal. He bides his time smoking pot and doing whatever odd jobs he has to, full of unnamed need and pent-up anger. When Starr’s current girlfriend, an attractive woman in her late thirties, comes to stay while fleeing another relationship, Innis’ deep sense of longing fixes on her. He feels fierce desire, but also something he recognises as good and true. Starr cautions him, and a bitter jealous rivalry begins to rage between them, violence lying just under the surface. As summer arrives, Innis’ suffocation and the tension between the two men are palpable.

Though life in this small community bound by memory and blood cannot cure Innis immediately of his anger, the rugged landscape does work a change on him. He takes on the challenge of the wild and harsh north woods where a man can get lost, learns the names of plants and wildlife, sketches and studies the natural world, and diligently cares for his illegal seedlings. As he grows stronger, he faces himself in the mirror and feels an emerging sense of self-worth and coming manhood. He realises he is learning an enjoyment of hard work and its rewards, although his crop might be less worthy than those of his predecessors. Affectionately sheltering the plants from bad weather and hungry deer, he muses, “Was there a Gaelic word for pot?”

Cape Breton has spawned a wealth of contemporary literature, from Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees to Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief and Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven. The region’s rugged landscapes, rural life and distinctive Gaelic traditions converging with modern social pressures have captured the attention of readers internationally; as they have in the work of other Atlantic Canada authors such as Michael Crummey, Wayne Johnston and David Adams Richards. MacDonald set his novel in the 1970s, when a country area of Cape Breton could still be a truly isolated backwater, the phone service on a party-line system and listening-in a regular pastime. “I needed to create a world that was much more cut off, where it would seem like exile to Innis and where he could never be alone or anonymous.”

Innis recalls his parents’ fights about “down home”, how they would one day love it to tears and the next day complain how it had held them back. Much as he wants to get off the Cape Breton Road, it may be that all the emotions that make life worth living — “love and anger and disappointment and hope” — lead back to the island. Cape Breton Road is a compelling coming-of-age story raw with beauty and emotion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #418553 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-04
• Released on: 2001-12-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Amazon.com
At the beginning of Cape Breton Road, D.R. MacDonald's 19-year-old protagonist finds himself deported from Boston, where he's stolen one too many cars. Innis is sent back to his native Nova Scotia--or more precisely, to remote Cape Breton Island. There he is exiled to the old family farmhouse to live with his reluctant uncle, whose penchant for booze and girls leaves little time for supervising an errant nephew. Not surprisingly, Innis at once looks for an escape. From time to time he hikes up into the hills, where he can plant his attic-nurtured marijuana seedlings far from prying eyes. Up in the woods he sets to work "with a pleasure no other task had matched, spacing the pots zigzag so they would look natural, like weeds, if someone did happen by, seduced, like him, by the light of a clearing."

The ice slowly melts, the sun bakes the earth, and Innis's seedlings flourish. He's also drawn into the community of old, Gaelic-speaking families, whose language and way of life may be melting with the snow, but whose sense of place gives them an inner knowledge no outsider could learn. Yet the forces of love and trust--as personified by his uncle's pretty, frivolous mistress, Claire--ultimately deal out devastation to the hero and those around him. Cape Breton Road has more than its share of suspense and erotic electricity. At the same time, however, it's an elegy to a fading way of life, and a portrait of landscape where nature is so fiercely uncompromising that it takes on a spectral, sinister force of its own. --Carey Green

Books in Canada
The narrative is classic in its simplicity: a young man in the grip of a criminal compulsion gets a police record and, because his parents have neglected to register him as a U.S. citizen, finds himself deported back to Canada. He returns to rural Cape Breton which he left as a child and where his family has deep ancestral roots. There he lives in the old family home, with a rough, hard-drinking, womanizing, bachelor uncle. Since he has no means of transportation, his escape from the uncle’s oppressive company is to lose himself in the deeply wooded area that surrounds the house. He also develops a long-range plan of escape; following a book of instructions, he plants and fosters marijuana seeds, hoping that the sale of the crop will fund his way out of the "ass-end of nowhere." Within those contours a familiar set of polarities emerges, every detail elaborating the clash between the old ways and the new. Behind Innis Corbett is the densely populated city of Boston from which he has been exiled. Its high-tech, speed-obsessed culture is typified by the automobile. It is a car accident that has robbed Innis of his father, and sent his mother into the arms of many lover; and it is stealing cars that is his particular brand of criminal activity. He steals mainly luxury cars—Lincoln Continentals, Porsches, Cadillacs—not for profit or vengeance or to impress the "hard guys" he runs with, but for the false high that his addiction produces. It is a high similar to that produced by his other addiction, smoking pot.
His native Cape Breton, in contrast, is sparsely populated. "You live a little differently when you have room," his uncle tells him. The inhabitants are mostly old families conscious of their family histories. They are descendants of the highland Scots who settled the place, and their speech is like their collective memory, rich with echoes of an earlier time. They make liberal use of Gaelic phrases, as in their familiar greeting, "Co leis thu?" (Whose are you?). This is a place where, to paraphrase a Faulknerian character, "the past is never past."
If there are fewer temptations to crime in this area, there are also fewer opportunities for earning money. Innis relies on odd jobs for pin money. He is a skilled artist but there is no profitable outlet for drawing and sketching in his life. It is a secret vice, like smoking pot, often at the service of his private erotic fantasies. His only artistic endeavor is a job painting the house of a kindly priest. Religion here is also a force that it is hard to ignore. In its trajectory, Innis Corbett’s journey parallels that of author D.R. MacDonald. MacDonald too was born on Cape Breton Island and left for the United States, where he served his apprenticeship as a writer. In 1969 he won a Stegner fellowship at Stanford where he now teaches. Yet in his fictional territory the ex-patriate finds himself pulled back over the border, compelled presumably, to his native roots. The correspondence between author and subject is worthy of note, because the motif of a return journey (both geographical and temporal) is a significant part not only of MacDonald’s plot but of his aesthetic philosophy.
If the summary of the novel suggests themes so familiar as to be almost hackneyed, that is not accident but a deliberate choice on the part of the author. MacDonald, by virtue of his profession and his current location in the most forward-looking part of the North American continent must be more aware than most of us of current trends and directions in turn-of-the-century writing. Yet he has deliberately turned his back on the hyperactive experimentation and often manic jocularity that has characterized the post-modern period. He has chosen instead the calm, unhurried idiom of an earlier time. It is no accident that his novel opens with a paragraph that consciously evokes Robert Frost’s 1923 poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Innis Corbett finds himself wandering in late afternoon in somebody else’s woods, the taste of "downy flake" on his tongue. The echo of a poem so familiar that it’s known by most high school students, is a bold, almost defiant gesture that amounts to a declaration of his literary purpose. And indeed, the rhythms of the following description of Innis as he finds his bearings in the woods have much in common with Hemingway’s descriptions of Nick Adams and Faulkner’s of Ike McCaslin:
He carried a bucksaw loosely in one hand, and in the other a walking stick that beat snow out of the boughs, showed him snow depth, ice thinness, heard but unseen water, and if he found himself without the stick, he would retrace his steps in a crouch until he saw where he had set it down, distracted by something he wanted to inspect—tracks, a bush, a hole in the snow that said an animal lives here.
Just as the idiom that falls on Innis’ ear in Cape Breton is tinged with biblical and Gaelic echoes, so MacDonald’s prose harks back to that of the great American stylists of the second decade of the twentieth century. There is no mischievous narrator here pulling playful tricks on the reader, but a narrative voice so steady and measured that it endows everything it relates with a mythic quality. It gives a step by step account of Innis Corbett’s patient efforts to raise his marijuana crop from seeds sent by a friend in Boston. He causes them to germinate in secrecy and darkness in the attic under the shelter of his grandmother’s loom. Finally, when their growing strength and the changing season makes it expedient to do so, he transplants them to a spot in the woods where they can thrive under his continued care. The whole description resonates with metaphorical implications. Thus a young man might thrive. And thus too, in similar circumstances, a writing talent might be fostered.
The narrative voice is also capable of fine lyric effects, as when Innis finally witnesses the silver thaw he has previously only heard of. It turns the trees into "teetering, translucent sculptures, laden with a lovely weight some could not hold, their crowns bent to the ground, their trunks bowed, gracefully tensed." The novel is a stylistic triumph, combining the strengths of an earlier era with, in its dialogue, the thoroughly modern vernacular of our day.
Like many of the writers MacDonald reveres and evokes, the territory he charts is basically masculine, a world of men without women. Predictably, since it goes with that territory, Innis runs into trouble in his new surroundings when a woman appears on the scene. She’s an ex-flight-attendant with great looks, great hair, long legs, and much expertise in the sack, the sleeping bag, on the beach, or wherever. One might wish that the character of this pre-feminist apparition had been drawn a little differently, perhaps that a mind had been added to her other attributes. But that’s a flaw outweighed by many virtues in a novel where so much is perfectly calibrated. --Joan Givner (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
Thirteen years after the publication of his 1988 Pushcart Prize-winning short story collection, Eyestone, MacDonald's fiction is still shaped by the rugged landscape of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In his debut novel, the drama again unfolds against the unforgiving geography of Canada's East Coast. When his penchant for stealing cars catches up with him in Boston, 20-year-old Canadian Innis Corbett is duly shipped back to Nova Scotia to live with his surly Uncle Starr. His uncle's remote Cape Breton farm is perched on the edge of a small community where everybody knows everyone else's business. Innis, determined to escape, devises a plan to cultivate pot in the attic to fund his next move. Into this unstable household drops Claire, a 40-ish former stewardess fleeing an abusive relationship. As Innis and Claire grow close, Starr's jealousy and suspicions bring tensions between the two men to the boiling point. The story takes several dramatic turns, but more compelling than the plot are the Cape Bretons whom Innis comes to know, a people long on memory and more than a little fey. MacDonald captures their dialect, strength and spirit with powerful clarity. The long gap between the publication of Eyestone and this novel means MacDonald will have to be introduced all over again to most readers, but the novel's terse prose, rich character development and strong themes make it a natural for handselling. (Jan.)
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