Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief given Port Hastings plaque

People arriving in Cape Breton after driving across the Canso Causeway can now soak up the island's culture through the words of one of its most-loved authors. 

Project Bookmark Canada has unveiled a plaque in Port Hastings in honour of late author Alistair MacLeod and his novel No Great Mischief.

The location near the causeway was chosen in part because it appears near the end of the novel. 

Project Bookmark Canada aims to put poster-sized plaques at the site of famous literary scenes across the country. Each contains up to 500 words from a story or poem.

Author Miranda Hill is the founder of Project Bookmark Canada.

"What we do is we tell you, this happened here — or, as I like to say, this didn't happen here," said Hill.  "It's a monument to the imagination. It's the anti-historical plaque, taking a real location and giving an imaginative view over top of it."

Novel has 'a mythical and magical quality'

Alistair MacLeod died in April 2014 at age 77.

No Great Mischief won the IMPAC Dublin Literacy award in 2001. It's the 14th literary work to earn a Bookmark plaque in Canada, and the first in the Maritimes.    

"In a lot of ways, it introduced a lot of readers to Cape Breton, people who had not heard of Cape Breton before. So it has a mythical and magical quality to it," said Hill. 

"That passage at the end of the novel which anybody who's read the novel can't forget, of the narrator and his brother coming back home across the causeway to Cape Breton is a passage that really, really worked as a bookmark. And [it] was so evocative, containing that sentence that all of us remember, which is 'All of us are better when we're loved.'"

MacLeod's son, Alexander, who is also an author, was among those on hand for the unveiling.

Other works recognized by Project Bookmark Canada include In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, The Republic of Love by Carol Shields, and Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels.