Monday 13 November 2017

All the Beloved Ghosts



I do. I do dream of Charleston. For many years, it was the same dream. The house was on fire and everyone was rushing around like ants. There was such confusion, such...chaos. But lately it's different. We're all gone. I can see deep rooms. The bricks are freshly whitewashed. The windows are open. The floorboards are bare and striped with sunlight. Each room is empty – of furniture, books, paintings – and dust is streaming, everywhere there's dust, but – how can I explain it? – it's golden. Endless. And we're gone: me, you, all the beloved ghosts, all of us. ~ all the beloved ghosts
All the Beloved Ghosts was nominated for Canada's 2017 Governor General's Award for English Fiction, leading me to read this short story collection. However, after the first story (The Thaw; a wonderfully interesting and insightful tale set in Cape Breton in the early twentieth century), there's nothing Canadian about this collection, other than author Alison MacLeod having been born here before moving to England to live and work. Aside from the lack of Canadian content (which is only a “lack” in the context of its GG nomination; naturally), after the first story – which I liked so much – this collection became very uneven for me: I liked the stories that featured/referenced other authors, but was made uneasy by stories from minority points-of-view that didn't feel like MacLeod's to tell. The highs and lows of this collection round out to three stars.

After The Thaw (which deftly explores race and class in a bygone time), the second story Solo, A Capella turns to the English riots of 2011, from the first-hand experience of African immigrants. And it was probably because of this side-by-side contrast that I admired the first – wherein a white woman witnesses and reacts to the racist treatment of African-American transplants – but questioned the authenticity of the second – wherein a white woman (the author herself) imagines the African immigrants' experience of and reaction to racism; is this really her story to tell? I was seriously made uncomfortable by the later story In Praise of Radical Fish, in which three loveable Muslim youths flirt with the idea of joining ISIS; is this MacLeod's story to tell? I was never unaware that the portrayal of these would-be jihadists as playful rapscallions was from the imagination of a white woman, and it rankled me. I thought that the writing in We Are Methodists was beautiful and that its inclusion of a PTSD-afflicted veteran of the Iraq War was nicely done, but the story How to Make a Citizen's Arrest (in which a woman abducts a currently depressed Tony Blair in an effort to hold him responsible for the same Iraq War) was sophomoric wish fulfillment – the first of these stories makes a powerful political statement while the second made me roll my eyes. 

I found the story There are precious things to be particularly affecting, exhibiting the wide mix of people on a London Underground train; good and bad both, and the basic decency of the majority of them in the end made my own heart swell:
Voices. Such noise, such terrifying noise. Clifton stumbles to his feet. He looks around the carriage, wild-eyed. Everyone is a stranger. “Stop!” he cries out, “please stop!” as the train pulls into St. Paul's, and Edgar, music in hand, leaps from the train to the platform, where James the conductor lifts his arm, and the voice of the first soloist rises. The notes soar, like Lionel's hope as he sprints away, palm pressed to his pocket; like the wave of love that lifts Sister Kate, at last, there in the ugly light of carriage three, where Tanisha takes Clifton tenderly by the hand, and the voices swell and the harmonies surge, rising above the astonished crowd.
In addition to these more political stories, the collection has many that reference other famous authors (the eponymous story, which I quoted at the beginning, is about Angelica Garnett, niece of Virginia Woolf), and for the most part I loved them all: stories with Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, and a trio about Anton Chekhov. MacLeod makes these stories her own by often injecting her authorial voice into them, and in the first of the Chekhov stories (Woman with Little Pug), by making the characters become aware that they are fictional:
At the window, the thin curtain lifted – although there was no breeze at all. Guy drew Anna close, and they stared into the night. The sea was black. The sky was black. All the lights on the Pier had gone out. Even the full moon had been extinguished from the fictive sky.
MacLeod uses real people in her stories twice more by featuring a friend of hers in The Heart of Denis Noble (a story that I loved; perhaps because I don't know Denis Noble) and by including the author's own pictures she took of Princess Diana on Di's first official visit to Canada in a story that leads up to the Princess' death in Dreaming Diana: Twelve Frames; a story that didn't do much for me. 

These stories represent a lovely mix of styles and voices and MacLeod is certainly a skillful writer. Ghosts and legends – the ephemeral boundary between the real and unreal; the known and unknown – tie this collection together, and overall, it feels successful. On the other hand, I had too many moments of objection to rate this collection any higher; too many eye-rolling, skeptical moments.

The 2017 Governor General's Literary Awards Finalists:


Won by We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night - which seems an odd choice to me. I liked it, but would have personally given the award to The Water Beetles.
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