The View from Castle Rock

Sarah Robertson is editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

The View from Castle Rock, reportedly Alice Munro’s last book, is a
family history divided into 12 short stories that occupy a middle ground
between fiction and memoir. In writing the stories, Munro explains in
her foreword, “I was … exploring a life, my own life, but not in an
austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote
about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this
self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done
in reality.”

The first part of the book traces the lives of Munro’s ancestors, a
dour Scottish Presbyterian family named the Laidlaws. In 1818, various
family members immigrated to Canada where they were spared few of the
hardships of pioneer life. The five stories in Part 1 blend
fictionalized action with quotations from letters and diaries, the
writings of author James Hogg (a Laidlaw cousin), and an unpublished
historical novel written by Munro’s father.

In Part 2 the focus shifts to the author’s personal history, moving
from childhood to old age. The theme of culturally imposed
self-abnegation, a recurring motif in Part 1, is revisited in Munro’s
brilliant evocation of the suffocating oppressiveness of small-town life
in circa 1950s Ontario: “In those days nobody in town went for walks,
except for some proprietary old men who strode around observing and
criticizing any municipal projects. People were sure to spot you if you
were noticed in a part of town where you had no particular reason to be.
Then somebody would say, we seen you the other day—and you were
supposed to explain.” Munro discerns within the various generations of
Laidlaws a split between those who recoil from “self-dramatization”
and “calling attention to yourself” and those—like Munro
herself—who are compelled to transform their lives into stories.

In the epilogue, Munro notes that the impulse to immerse oneself in
family history “happens mostly in our old age, when our personal
futures close down and we cannot imagine … the future of our
children’s children.” The View from Castle Rock is at its core a
late-in-life family project that eloquently bespeaks the author’s
insistence “on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.”