All The Men Are Sleeping [Hardcover]

D.R. MacDonald is known for his short stories of memory and loss set on Cape Breton Island and for his highly praised novel Cape Breton Road, an extended treatment of the same themes. In All the Men Are Sleeping, a selection of stories from the length of his career, MacDonald, whose own family left Cape Breton during the Second World War, documents the strong sense of place that is often paradoxically coupled with a history of economic displacement. That forced trajectory, movingly described in stories like "The Flowers of Bermuda" and "Ideas of North," extends all the way from the island of Iona in northern Scotland to California. Often, as in the title story, which takes the reader inside the consciousness of a woman trapped in a Cape Breton winter, the tender savagery of the Cape Breton environment plays a central role, which allows MacDonald to explore his ideas in a sensual rather than abstract way. MacDonald can be an unsentimental, even austere writer, but his work is not without its humorous moments. In "Whatever's Out There," a woman recalls her aging ex-husband "wringing his thinning gray hair into a ponytail that gave to his face the strained profile of a hood ornament." These stories reveal the depth of MacDonald's craft as well as his intimate familiarity with his material. --Robyn Gillam

D. R. MacDonald's All Men Are Sleeping collects fifteen strong, distinctive stories, all of them rooted in the culture of Cape Breton and almost all of them in its geography as well. (The exceptions are set in the American diaspora.) MacDonald's prose moves slowly, confidently, ceremoniously. What it both celebrates and eulogizes, clear-sightedly and unsentimentally, is not really, as the cliché would have it, "a way of life," with its concomitant easily arrived at dismissive analyses and imagery of picturesque communal decline. It's something else, not so readily definable. The men and women of these stories, even when their decisions and actions are foolish, remain somehow invested with a dignity that transcends the realm of the sociological bromide. An individual life is a unique and serious thing, this book says, more important than any rhetorical use that may be made of it.
One comes away from All the Men Are Sleeping with a memory not so much of individual stories as of a world whose qualities are perhaps best suggested in a review by means of haiku-like excerpts: A small boy kneels on the beach, plowing a wooden boat through the sand. MacCuaig envies the grave absorption of his play.

"The snow seemed alive, restless, whorled around fenceposts, the long aching curls of drifts, dark blue, from which the wind spun crystals, a sharp, soft spray on her face. A low, black ridge behind the barns was edged with the cold silver of a set moon.
The cliffs leaned back, pushed by the sheer weight of what they'd been through. The ocean bore upon them. Their steepness plunged to pinnacled rock, to strewn and fractured boulders the water was slowly covering and revealing."

Against such backdrops, human endeavour is described with similar astringency. There's religion: "A hard man in a rigid denomination: it made Knox Presbyterians sound like libertines. The Gospel Hall wouldn't let you pee if they thought it would make you feel good." There's work, shoveling snow for example: "Like the world was an hourglass and you digging there at the bottom of it." There's sex: "He turned calmly and hugged her to him, his delight flowing through her, out of his own unself-pitying solitude." And there's death—a father gives his young son a photograph of nine corpses in a morgue, victims of a shipwreck from which the father escaped: "What my father wanted me to learn from this stark picture I do not know. If he wanted me only to remember it, I have." And perhaps this is what MacDonald is up to: making us remember, letting us decide for ourselves what is to be learned. In the last paragraph of the title story, a country doctor and his visiting ex-girlfriend are crossing a frozen lake on a horse-drawn sleigh when the ice begins to crack: "Isobel turned and saw water, the awful color of it seeping into snow like blood in a cut, into the thin grooves playing out behind them, but she said nothing. She wanted to seize Blair's arm, infuse its tense, solid life with her own, but she didn't. She held onto the seat."
A parabolic image of the precarious balance between life and death? Is Isobel's internal conflict between desire and the need to restrain it a way of epitomizing a culture? MacDonald doesn't stoop to such generalizations. He gives us the picture, trusting it to work in its own way, leaving us immersed in its immediacy: "She was here, and she would be here as long as this horse kept moving, kept churning snow into the bright morning air." There's not a badly written sentence in the book. There's not a paragraph that doesn't do its job, usually unobtrusively. These stories are built to last. And they will.
Lawrence Mathews (Books in Canada)