Review Essay: “Beyond Metaphor”: The Uncanny Precariousness of Being

Paradise Island and Other Galaxies is a moving, uncanny collection of short stories. The title, unassumingly, points to a simple, even a popular work of speculative fiction, but the stories are vastly more complex, both semantically and stylistically. The first, “Milk Run,” is narrated in the dry, cynical tone of a classic heavy-drinking antihero from the noir genre, who receives a summons from the primum mobile in hard-boiled stories: a sexually alluring woman, “a long-time-no-see fling of mine” (1). In a delightfully dystopian turn, the narrator travels in a spaceship that is an alien travesty of a low-cost flight, where, to the reader's relief, the ever-present screaming toddlers are blissfully eaten up by some of the Hieronymus Bosch-like passengers. The revolutionary robot hijacker, whose dialogue with the narrator is a brilliant parody of politically correct discourse (10), promptly brainwashes everybody except the narrator, converting them to a machine-worship cult, something between “an old-style revivalist prayer meeting” (13) and an ironic version of the machine-dominated world of the Terminator film saga.“My name, as I said before, is Givens” (20): from the first line of “Rules of Conduct,” we are plunged into a dystopian world, where time can collapse and life is subject to a set of arbitrary rules given by a specular “symbiotic twin,” anagrammatically named Snevig. In an effectively unnerving piece of contemporary gothic, the Unheimliche lies in the claustrophobic sense of repetition, the use of the double, and the sense of familiarity given by the parallels with our own world.The opening section of “Bishop Berkeley among the Material Savages” is a dialogue among Berkeley, Locke, and other philosophers who have analyzed the nature of perception, taking the ironically appropriate shape of a scene from an absurdist drama, followed by the hallucinatory vision of Berkeley himself, seasick on his return voyage to Ireland, and plunged, as if in a kind of contrappasso, into a graphically depicted hellish, shape-shifting reality where time, space, and perception collide.Paradise Island develops the time-honored device of the old manuscript, in this case a purported letter from Captain Cook, in a subtly ironic, postmodern vein. The text is dotted with footnotes, a sort of academic commentary—with all of academia's idiosyncrasies and foibles transpiring from the words of the imaginary editor, in passages such as “Some, especially those who fancy themselves Freudian, have seen this paragraph as the start of a slow descent into paranoia and delusion” (66n7).The notes also provide alternative interpretations of the events “Captain Cook” relates in a language that—with no attempt at mock-antique style—sounds entirely credible in an eighteenth-century seaman. “Casebook: In the Matter of Father Dante Lazaro” is an allegorical tale of an alien population's conversion to Christianity. Allusions to controversial historical issues such as the connection between mass conversion and colonial exploitation are adumbrated in the events following the attempts at Christianization of New Horizon by the missionary priest Father Dante Lazaro. The naiveté of his letters to Pope Aldebaran IV creates an elegantly ironic mode of estrangement reminiscent of the Lettres Persanes. With a “note of mockery, of gentle cynicism” (95), the new brood of converted aliens questions many of the Roman Catholic “ecclesiastical niceties” (98) with an irresistibly comic literalness; but the end is tragical, as in Lazaro's desperate appeal to the Pope: “But I urge you to hurry, Your Extreme Holiness. Time is running very short. The Age of Doubt is almost upon us. Again” (96).Brief and nightmarish, “The Mother” is the story of a woman's struggle to preserve her child after the collapse of civilization. Its uncanny element lies, once again, in the sense of familiarity: the protagonist's quiet acceptance of a world inhabited by fiendish alien predators is punctuated by sickening flashes of memories from her past, which is the reader's present. As in “Milk Run,” the narrator of “The Life and Times of Harry Quick, P.I.,” speaks in the cynically detached tone of the hard-boiled detective type. This time he is indeed a private investigator, and the parallels with the noir are many—from the protagonist's liquor drinking to the device of setting the plot in motion by a newspaper headline, as often happens in Hollywood noir classics. This familiar structure is embedded in an unfamiliar setting: the story moves along the lines of the detective-ex-policeman collaborating with his former colleagues in solving a complicated case. This type is one of the versions of the flawed hero our collective imagination cherishes most, thanks to countless classic and contemporary films that have made it an icon, perhaps—together with the screen vampire—the last remnant of the Byronic hero we can afford.The story is set in a cruelly dehumanized world, and the narrator's matter-of-fact acceptance of it heightens its chilling effect. The perfectly construed noir plot has a surprising ending, which leaves the reader with a disturbing sense of the precariousness of his own civilization. On the other hand, “The Lyzard and the Lady” ironically explores the precariousness of humanity itself, through the tale of an interplanetary royal marriage between a woman and a lizard-shaped alien potentate.With its talking carnivorous plants and abandoned, crumbling city library, “Hothouse Love” makes direct reference to 1950s and ’60s popular dystopian tales of the Twilight Zone kind, whose iconic episode Time Enough at Last (1953) immediately comes to mind. It is perhaps the most moving and uncanny tale of the collection because it is not set in an imaginary distant planet but in a Toronto ravaged by a hundred years of civil war, where visual reminders survive of an extinct culture that is, alarmingly, our own. The story hovers between fairytale and hagiography, toying with some typical themes of both genres: the enchanted sleep and talking animals and plants of the fairytale are mixed with miracle working and the fruitless efforts at killing the protagonist by the powers that be, which are decidedly reminiscent of martyrs’ tales from hagiography classics such as Jacobus de Varagine's Golden Legend. The sense of unreality lent by these literary conventions highlights the tragic reality of today's environmental crisis.In what could be termed a postmodern version of Darwinian Gothic, the leitmotiv in these short stories is that of regression: whether they are set in a world inhabited by cruel predators, dominated by robotics, or otherwise postapocalyptic, they all adumbrate our own world, symbolically ready to be plunged into some sort of precivilized, pre-ethical dimension. The Unheimliche derives from the reminder of something familiar, heightening the horror and throwing into sharp relief the underlying quest for sense in our time.This symbolic cluster pervades many of the poems contained in At the End of the World. The haunting sections Caves I and Caves II evoke the disturbing quality of the primitive, the prehistoric, the feral and pre-evolutionary. The time is out of joint, and “Millennia [are] accordioned into a single moment” (“The Bear,” 8), in a cave where a “creature [is] squatting / in the goddess pose,” like a feminine equivalent of the slouching beast from Yeats's Second Coming, primeval and apocalyptic at the same time. It is meant to arouse a fear of regression verging on annihilation, “an edgeless whole . . . that shreds who or what / they have come to believe they are—microbe, / rock, tree, mammal, android—and recasts them / kicking and screaming into the not-I” (“Sarlacc's Pit, or: The Cave of the Giant's Mouth,” 16).All the poems are crafted with a deep sense of the music of words, some are beautifully obscure, yet, in most of them, a sympathetic note can be found: the frightening quality of life and death is expressed through flashes that resurface like something ineffable (“the terror called language”) yet recognizable: in the lines “the passage we all / carry with us. The code that disallows understanding” (“The Selfish Pool: A Meditation,” 14), the enjambement emphasizes “we all,” the communality of the fruitless quest for what lies beyond “the horizon. / As if something were truly there.” Their lack of artifice makes these poems stir any reader's recollections, in the deeply symbolic yet empathetic tones that only downright good poetry can achieve.Painfully evocative, “The Dream of an Anxious Transcendence” deploys a cluster of images such as “mickey mouse stuffie,” “Ikea crosses,” in a concentrated, devastatingly sympathetic rendering of a mother's loss of her child (18–20) and the anaphoric structure of “In the Morning. Thoughts on a Dying Friend” emphasizes the merciless routine of modern hospital deaths, while “In the Cave of Contemplation” (21) re-echoes the poetic self's past, intimate, personal, yet, at the same time, universal in the depiction of the mechanics of memory and loss: “There are days that fit me into foot paths / no longer present, beyond metaphor” (21).Sketches of other people's lives are shown with deep empathy, for instance, in “An Uncle Prepares to Complete His Circle,” which might be styled a poetic bit of Urbex: the life of a simple man in its painstakingly detailed surroundings projecting, as if through a magic lantern, instants of a plain yet fulfilling existence, with its routine and predictable dreams of “the beaches all lined up / for inspection . . . Maine . . . Cuba . . . Florida” (25). This sense of empathy is strongest in the Chorus at the end of Caves I, “I have carried / these bones as / far as they will allow” (“These Bones,” 22), reminiscent of the Chorus of the Women of Canterbury from Murder in the Cathedral and the sense of the fellowship of suffering they evoke.The quest for a meaning in mortality, in “the cruelty that is time” (“The Hermit of Meteora,” 79) is also at the core of musical gems like “Let Us Arrive” (“in the haunting that is time / we have come full circle” (37), the eerie “Bluebird,” where “Shadows / enter through impossible doors, portals / dividing one side from the other” (38), and “Upon Re-Uniting with Her Husband,” where the afterlife is no longer the Shakespearean “undiscovered country” but a familiar “undiscovered room” (40).Written, as it were, from “the dark corner / where the true light shines” (“Id-entity,” 69), these poems do not provide any chic theodicy or assume a tacky postmodern nihilism. As we may see in the biblically allusive lines “Without the basinet afloat on its surface / you ask: why is the river even there?” (“Arguments for Safe Passage,” 46), these poems provide no answers: they suggest all the right questions.

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