Andrea and I were thirteen and beginning to outgrow this daylight world of lessons and games and sing-alongs. We were sick of having our days parsed into hour-long blocks, sick of being led from one activity to the next. We were hungry for feral time. That's why we loved the dark.The Dark and Other Love Stories is a skilled collection of short fiction, and while these stories do cover a variety of themes, “love” in its many forms makes frequent appearances. My favourites were those stories, like the titular one, that feature girls on the cusp of adolescence: that confusing time of desire and fear; bonding with your girlfriends while teasing the boys; wanting older guys to notice you but not actually wanting them to touch you. Author Deborah Willis repeatedly provoked nods of recognition from me –yes, it was, it is, just like that – and I can't ask for much more from a book.
In The Dark, two girls who become fast friends at summer camp decide to start sneaking out at night; walking through the midnight forest to where they can spy on the aged trail horses who become transformed into something magical by moonlight:
We approached the horses quietly, with the single-mindedness of lovers. It was as though Andrea and I had created them, as though they were our secret, a gift we'd given each other. They had a quiet kind of bravery, a grace I've rarely seen since. The only thing that comes close is the dignity of some old women – the ones who remember being beautiful, the ones who know they still are.When a camp counselor busts the girls and they decide to start skinny dipping in the lake at night instead, the sudden appearance of two men in a rowboat challenges their bravado. I believed every minute of this story and the flip from joy to menace was really well executed. In The Passage Bird, when a fourteen-year-old's family suffers a tragedy, she begins spending time with the Hawk Man; an old friend of her father's who keeps birds of prey. Conflating concern with desire, the girl offers herself to the older man:
She wanted him to say it. To expose his hunger so she could hate and pity and love him for it. She wanted him to grip her hand the way the hawk had.And in a later story featuring teenage girls, Welcome to Paradise, two friends combat an endless summer of suburban boredom by breaking into neighbourhood houses and flirting with the pizza delivery guys at the local plaza. When events occur that threaten to push the two from girlhood into adulthood, it's all too much for one of them:
I wanted to tell her what had happened with Cody, how it was nothing like Cosmo had promised. I wanted her to wipe my eyes with her sleeve and say, it's okay, and then it would be. I wanted us to sit at the bottom of a pool that would never be filled. To go to paradise and never get caught. To live together in another country, in our own house, a house with gold walls and a tiger guarding the door.At one point, the Hawk Man explains that a “passage bird” is one caught from the wild, and that not all wild things can make the transition to domesticity. This theme comes up repeatedly – from the ex-Olympian, now drug dealer, who applies for a reality-show/space mission in Girlfriend on Mars, to a Holocaust-survivor who becomes a recluse in the woods of British Columbia in Last One to Leave, to a drunken father who can't quite get himself together for the sake of his young son in I Am Optimus Prime – and is made more literal as another young father, Eddie, tries to tame a crow while getting his own life together in Todd:
She shuddered in his hand. Then made a low, tuneless sound, like she was asking a question. And he tried not to cry, tried not to keen. Tried to quiet himself so she could listen for an answer, so she could find her way. He touched the bird's broken wing-feathers, settled her against his chest, and hoped this would calm her. Hoped she'd forgive him. Hoped she was listening to tectonic shifts, or meteors, or the hush of rain before it falls.I liked that the next story, Flight, which features another teenage girl trying to spread her wings, revisits Eddie (and we see that he seems to be doing better, even if he can't tame a girl any better than he can tame a crow). The last two stories are perhaps the most traditional love stories, with The Ark recounting a match born in childhood (but which isn't the happy tale that it at first appears):
I held out both hands to him, knowing we would build our own ark in this world. But he didn't catch me. He moved calmly away, one step higher. And I lost my balance, fell down the stairs, fell so fast that my brain didn't keep up. My brain didn't keep up for years. It still reached for him, still felt relief, still believed in this story: that this was love, that it would save me.And the final entry, Steve and Lauren: Three Love Stories, is told in three parts; each of which features something weirdly off-kilter. In The Hole, the newly married pair refuses to acknowledge the black abyss that's growing in their living room. In The Watch, Steve becomes attracted to a woman at work; someone who causes his watch to stop every time she comes near. And in The Nap, Steve and Lauren fall asleep as young lovers and wake up fifty years later, trying to decide if theirs had been a happy match based on the scant clues they can find:
Life seemed so solid once, but now it had melted like Dali’s watch and slipped through their fingers. They read over their tax returns, looked at the photos, and decided they’d lived a good life, without tragedy or scandal. Did this make them a success? Had it been the goal? Was it enough?Each story in this collection captures something real, told in fine sentences, and for the most part, touched me (I caught my breath more than once). I liked the variety of Canadian settings – from suburban Calgary to the wild B.C. Coast – and really identified with the depictions of teenage girls. A worthwhile read.
The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck
After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):
I Am a Truck
Minds of Winter
Son of a Trickster
Bellevue Square
Transit
