Cape Breton Road: A Novel - Hardcover

Macdonald, D. R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151005230 ISBN 13: 9780151005239

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001

Synopsis

This is the story of Innis Corbett, a young man born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, into a Highlander community whose inhabitants are held by ties of memory and blood. As a child Innis went with his parents to live in Boston. After his father was killed in a car accident, Innis was raised by his mother, a woman with a weakness for men and drink. When Innis gets into trouble over a series of car thefts, he is deported back to Canada, a fate worse than prison, in his eyes. Innis ends up living with his Uncle Starr amidst the harshly beautiful landscape that has shaped his family and that both absorbs and challenges him. He takes refuge in the wild, dense woods, where he devises a plan to grow marijuana. This venture relieves his loneliness and gives him something to care for, a secret of his own. Then Claire, an attractive former flight attendant nearing 40, enters the Starr household. So begins an entanglement that leads to suspicion, jealousy, and ultimately to violence. Cape Breton Road is an exceptional novel by a writer with an unerring eye for landscape and tragedy that is bred in the bone.

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Review

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

Book Description

Published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2001, 0-15-100523-0

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0151005230
• ISBN 13: 9780151005239
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320