No Great Mischief.

by Alistair MacLeod; Vintage, 2001, $21.95.

THIS WONDERFUL new novel has little plot as such. It is a meditation on love and loyalty, history and kinship. It works like a Celtic design or a Gaelic song, forever circling on itself and embroidering the same few motifs. It is true art because it transcends the grief which helps power it. It is beautiful beyond words, and vindicates a line by the Highland poet Ian Crichton Smith, who died recently: "There is fresh dew on the ballads."

All a reviewer can do is suggest the larger context in which the work has its meaning, and convey a bit of its flavour.

The friends and foes of the royal house of Stuart fought each other for a hundred years first as Cavaliers and Roundheads, then as Jacobites and Whigs. Their wars were, as Coleridge put it, "a contest between the two great moving principles of social humanity".

On one hand is the view that there is a basic order of things which we disregard at our peril. On the other is a claim that we can construct any order we choose. These positions have been called those of "the party of Memory" and "the party of Hope".

The final defeat of the Stuart cause on Culloden moor in 1746 left the party of Hope--that is, the social engineers and the "Whig interpretation of history"--more or less unchallenged down to the present. This is why we assume that novelty is better than constancy, grievance is better than gratitude, and that the glass is forever half empty rather than half full.

Two and a half centuries of hostile propaganda has painted the party of Memory as the side of inherited privilege. In fact it is the high-ups who can best work the chaos and scramble of Modernity to their own advantage. It is the unprivileged whose well-being depends on a bedrock of traditional values. As Chesterton put it: "Honour is a luxury for aristocrats but a necessity for hall-porters."