"The Boat"
“The Boat” is one of MacLeod’s most popular and studies stories because of the richness of its meanings delivered with precisely crafted subtlety. It is the story of a mother who has invested all her deeply ingrained loved of the sea in her son since her daughters have rejected the local fishermen as husband material. The generation tension usually present between fathers and sons in MacLeod’s thus undergoes a gender transformation, but the underlying agency of evolving times is still at the center. One of the subtly ironic moments arrives in the wake of the mother berating her son for choosing books over parents in the form of an image of the son watching the boats head out to sea from inside his seat in school where the teacher is instructing the class in the “water imagery of Tennyson.”
Parenting
The irony of a parent giving advice to children to seek their way elsewhere when the town their families have lived in for generations begins dying as a result of economic deprivation is given poignancy in an observation from “The Closing Down of Summer.”
“Perhaps it is always so for parents who give the young advice and find that it is followed. And who find that those who follow such advice must inevitably journey far from those who give it”
"As Birds Brings Forth the Sun"
One the most disturbing examples of irony in MacLeod’s short fiction—certainly one of the cruelest-is the manner of death which befalls the master of the enormous dog at the center of the story. It is a story of loyalty between species, uncritical animal instinct in action and the often vicious way that nature has of changing things on a whim. His gruesome demise at the arrival of a pack of wild dogs is heartbreakingly ironic.
"The Tuning of Perfection"
This story features an event which plays into the larger theme to a far greater degree than it impacts the narrative. The aging protagonist needs to sell a young healthy mare, but is horrified to learn that rather than a good life producing healthy young foals, her destiny is instead to be kept perpetually pregnant so a pharmaceutical company can use her to make their birth control pills. Or, as the man who relates this shocking turn of event puts it with an ironic capper:
“They keep the mares pregnant all the time so the women won’t be.”
Gender
More than a few scholars and critics have noticed that taken as a collective unit in which certain themes and subjects recur over and over again, one of the most pervasive ironies of MacLeod’s body of short stories is rooted in gender. By and large, his stories are told from the masculine perspective; quite a few are generational struggles between fathers and sons. It is the men in whom the emotional toll of economic deprivation in the name of universal progress is most often demonstrated and since this economy is inevitably dependent upon rough physical labor required for mining or fishing, these are rough men. Despite this, time and time again it is the wives and mothers and daughters and granddaughters who are ultimately revealed to have weathered the storm with the greatest strength. The world of MacLeod is a patriarchy, but with some ironic dimension in the reality that it is the women who often are revealed as stronger.
