Mind Picker: Paradise & Elsewhere

I feel how in these last hot days and years the world is full of parables, prefiguration and correspondence. Even half-truths or outright lies hide lessons and examples, and somewhere, beneath one of these dry stones, curled like a bug, is hope.

I had read that the stories in Kathy Page's Paradise & Elsewhere are strange and fable-like, but other than fictional settings (that could actually fit in on Earth somewhere) or a plausible near-future, the first few stories in this collection didn't really feel fantastic: G'Ming could happen in any remote village and Lak-ha, while it has a quirk in it, fits into our world. The Ancient Siddanese, even though it takes place in a slightly dystopic near future, is a visit to an archeological site not unfamiliar to us today, and later, similarly, My Beautiful Wife and Clients take place in recognisable (if unhappy) near-futures. Yet, for most of Of Paradise, I was totally misdirected, believing that it was set in any desert oasis in any time frame, but when it ended and I realised that my preconceived notions had prevented me from understanding what I was clearly reading -- that's when I realised something special was happening. So while the first few stories don't really represent the whole of this collection, they did provide an easy introduction to an inventive author and her world-building.

Low Tide certainly did feel mythical, beginning with a woman who emerges naked from the ocean, claiming to have transformed from a sea creature.

(B)y the boat stood a man, watching me through binoculars. Did his watching change me that first time? Or did I, wet-dreaming until I caught fire, invent him, then split my pelt with longing and climb out of it? Maybe it was both of these things; in any case, at the beginning neither of us cared.

So much is eventually revealed -- the man lost his unbalanced wife to the sea, so is this her returned, as he believes? But if so, why doesn't the wife's clothes fit her? Can she really transform herself? Or is this the unbalanced mind and she's an unreliable narrator? -- and all of these facts keep the reader off balance and distracted from what's actually happening: a power struggle about physical and sexual exploitation, and from beginning to end, this is probably my favourite story in the book.

We, the Trees serves as a warning against an impending and unhappy future (but didn't really work for me) and at least one story maybe went too far with the fantastic -- I Like to Look -- and a couple of stories felt a bit pointless (Woodsmoke and My Fees), but many stories were intriguing and thought-provoking. Lambing was another standout, and although it had the feeling of a Grimm's fairytale, I absolutely believed that it could happen in our world and it touched me. So too was I affected by The Kissing Disease (imagine a world where adolescents have been raised to fear kissing and the strange disease that it unleashes; would never kissing be inhuman?). And Saving Grace -- another slightly unhappy near-future -- was a fascinating trip away from civilisation (and is therefore the opposite journey to many of the stories here).

If Page has a recognisable format, it's to conjure a barely different world, and just when the reader is comfortable in it, she adds a few more details that turn things around. And this generally doesn't feel like a gotcha or an O. Henry-type twist, but just a resolution of an out-of-focus picture; a lifting of the dry stones to reveal what lies beneath, curled like a bug. And so very much of it is simply finely written:

She left, I stayed put. She has a story to tell; I sit and stare, look and see. While she was away I saw some sights. I saw our mother shrink. Her skin grew yellow, a damp envelope. I saw the snowdrops each spring. I saw a last breath, and the skin grow luminously pale. I pulled back the sheet and looked upon our mother's bones, seemingly wrapped in bleached and shrunken cloth. I saw our brother, taller than any of us and fitter too, trying to catch sparrows in his useless hands. I looked at rainbows in soapsuds stretching and bursting, at a tangle of earthworms, wet, glistening; saw the scars where their ends had grown back. I saw the yellow stone of our house obscured by ivy, how the small dry roots pushed themselves into its pores and cracks. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt that it would break; I looked longer and the feeling went away.

Overall, these stories seem really simple while reading them and improve upon reflection. While I did love a few of the stories, I can't say I loved the whole collection, and it's really more of a 3.5 stars, with a conflicted rounding down.