Book Review: ‘The Oatmeal Ark’

Rory MacLean’s ‘The Oatmeal Ark‘ is part travel memoir, part historical fiction. Or maybe it’s part history book, and part travel fiction. It’s hard to pin this book down: it blurs the line between fact and fiction, past and present.

The book follows the fictional Beagan Gillean as he travels the world in search of a family history: from his great-grandfather’s homeland in Scotland’s Western Isles, and then in his family’s footsteps across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia, and clear across Canada, by water, to the West Coast. Traveling with Beagan are the ghosts of his great-grandfather, his grandfather and his father – each takes their turn narrating the story.

Historical fiction, however blurred, is a tricky thing to pull off: the antiquated dialogue is hard to master without seeming forced, and it’s easy to make a mis-step describing the details of daily life. That’s where the ambiguities of ‘The Oatmeal Ark’ are a major asset: since you can never be sure whether the ghosts are real, or simply figments of Beagan’s imagination, you don’t (or at least, I didn’t) find yourself nitpicking in the same way.

In others way, though, the ghosts are problematic. At times it can be a little difficult keeping track of the narrator’s identity: shifts are signaled only by subtle changes in font, as well as language and tone. The ghosts are often also used to fill information gaps – early Canadian history, for example – and the result can feel a little expository.

MacLean has some compelling insights into the forces that drive North Americans to seek out their ancestral lands. His historical scenes offer a powerful sense of the rawness of the “New World” when it was first being settled: of its harshness, but also of its vast possibilities. And the contrasting images of an early Atlantic crossing, by sail, with Beagan’s modern-day crossing aboard an enormous freighter, offer remarkably complementary visions of two very different, but equally grim, journeys.

I said earlier that historical fiction is tough to pull off, and that’s true: but for me, it’s the present-day aspects of this book that let me down.

Truthfully, I didn’t recognize the Canada that Beagan travels through, from an incredibly bleak, hopeless Cape Breton Island to an antagonistic Montreal, sharply divided along linguistic lines. True, Cape Breton has long been economically marginalized – and true, Quebec separatism was a major issue in the mid-1990s, when MacLean was doing his research for this book. But at times, the story takes the “current affairs” of the day and applies them too literally to everyday Canadian life.

At the end of the day, my verdict on this book, like its precise genre, is hard to pin down. There are moments of immense beauty, and some wonderful insights. There are also times when the story seems forced, the history lessons wedged uncomfortably into the narrative.

Still, I think anyone with an interest in traveling to their ancestral homeland – particularly if that homeland happens to be Scotland – might enjoy giving ‘The Oatmeal Ark’ a read.