This time it’s personal

The View from Castle Rock
by Alice Munro
Chatto and Windus ₤15.99, 349 pages
FT bookshopprice: ₤12.79

Deft, elegant and achingly poignant, Alice Munro’s short stories are held up as exemplars of their form. Indeed, A.S. Byatt has gone so far as to describe her as the “greatest living short-story writer”. And Munro’s farmhouse in Ontario must be crammed full of all the awards she has won - including the W.H. Smith Literary Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, and the Canada-Australia Literary Prize. Yet, after 11 short-story collections and one - Booker-nominated - novel (The Beggar Maid, 1980), her astounding critical acclaim has not been followed with popular success outside her native Canada.

Munro’s latest collection, The View from Castle Rock, is the most personal yet, as it concerns her own family history. Written in her wonderfully precise, sparse prose, the first half, entitled “No Advantages”, is about her Presbyterian ancestors, the Laidlaws, who lived in the Ettrick Valley in southern Scotland and set sail for Nova Scotia in 1818. Part two, “Home”, focuses on the writer’s selected memories of her own youth and small-town life in wartime Canada.

Luckily for Munro, there seemed to be at least one keen scribe in each generation of the Laidlaws, so she had plenty of letters and diaries from which to glean an idea of their lives. But, as she makes clear in her foreword, this is fiction: she has shaped the facts into characters and stories. Even when writing about herself in the later parts of this book, the writer states that verisimilitude was never her intention: “I was doing something closer to what a memoir does - 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 story that gives the collection its title is one of its highlights. Near the beginning of the 19th century, 10-year-old Andrew Laidlaw is taken on to the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle by his drunken father, James, and his entourage from the pub. James tells them all that the stretch of water they can see - which is actually the Firth of Forth - is the Atlantic and the land on the other side is America, not Fife. Munro is never one for predictable plotting, and it is part of this story’s charm that, as an adult looking back, Andrew could never work out if his father’s drinking buddies had been mocking him - or the other way round.

The life Andrew and his descendants were to lead in Canada was to be free from such alcohol-fuelled antics. Carving homes from the forest and eking out a living from the land, their tenets were hard work, frugality and grim acceptance. It is testament to Munro’s originality that she takes the familiar settler story and makes it all her own - not for her the dewy-eyed vision of brave and hearty idealists. In “The Wilds of Morris Township” Forrest Laidlaw incites the derision of his siblings when he strives to better himself. Eschewing the family cabin, he builds a large house for himself - apparently in the hope of a wife and offspring. But he never marries and ends up sharing his home with his sister, Lizzie, to the scorn of those around them.

Munro’s own father is quoted as wondering about this Laidlaw myopia: “To think what their ancestors did,” he said. “The nerve it took, to pick up and cross the ocean. What was it that squashed their spirits? So soon.”

When it comes to her own stories, Munro’s self-awareness is razor sharp. In “Hired Girl” there is empathy with her younger proud self’s dislike of working through the summer as a maid in a rich family’s house, but also gentle ridicule of her need for self-dramatisation. The letter she writes to her friend, transforming the banal middle-class cocktail party organised by her employers, the Montjoys, into a lurid fantasy, with her rebuffing the sexual advances of an older suitor, is very funny.

All these stories explore the links between Munro’s individual identity and her family history but, more than that, they are highly entertaining. If there is one writer who proves that the short story should never be deemed the uninspiring younger sibling of the novel, it is Munro.