While there are quite a lot of weird goings on in Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod’s wonderful collection ‘Island’, I was surprised by the supernatural elements found in one story, ‘Vision’. Like all the stories in the book, ‘Vision’ is set in Cape Breton, Nova Socia. While sea fishing, a father recounts to his son a tale of a trip he and his twin brother took as children to Canna Island. They were paying a surprise visit to their grandparents, but got lost and ended up in the filthy, cat-infested home of an old blind woman. They eventually find their grandparents house, but their connection to the old blind woman runs deeper than they realise, and she will end up saving one of their lives on the beach at Normandy during World War II, many years after her own death.
I also have to mention the opening story in this collection, ‘The Boat’, which is my favourite in the book. It’s a fantastic story but not one for this anthology.
First published in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories, McClelland & Stewart, 1986, and collected in Island, McClelland & Stewart, 2000, and again in Island: The Collected Short Stories, 2017
A Personal Anthology 