Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "ghost"
Journeying into Mary Rickert's Kingdom
TRUE (Tuesday Round Up of Everything) post Post #2:
Mary Rickert (M. Rickert)-- "Journey into the Kingdom"
I was hoping to get to Mary Rickert's new novel, The Memory Garden, before we have the chance to talk and work together at Readercon next week--just because I'm so sure it's going to be good--but work and life keep interfering. So I went back this weekend and caught up with this masterful mid-length story from 2006, which I hadn't previously read.
A lighthousekeeper's daughter and her widowed mother get visited, on their island--where the only thing that seems to grow is plants from the seed packet their husband/father had in his hand when he drowned--by the ghost of the husband/father. Who keeps melting into a puddle. And who one night brings a younger ghost-sailor as a guest. The ghosts are gentle, sweet, alive, full of stories. And they feed on breath. From the mouths of the living, or stolen from just-used coffee cups.
As in the reconfigured fairy tales of W.B.Yeats, and as in most of my favorite ghostly tales, everyone in this story tells a story (one character even declares--as though stealing the breath from MY mouth--"Don't you think we've gotten awful complacent in our society about story?"). The emotional landscape is wild and weird and full of shadows, even though the characters themselves are all somewhat detached either by grief or by no longer living (and "a remembered emotion is like a remembered taste, it's never really there"). The end is scarier than you expect, and also a sort of sweet, and as to what, exactly, happened, and whose story was closest to truth, and whether that ending is happy or sad, and for whom...
Great, great story. She's a major writer. Go read her.
Mary Rickert (M. Rickert)-- "Journey into the Kingdom"
I was hoping to get to Mary Rickert's new novel, The Memory Garden, before we have the chance to talk and work together at Readercon next week--just because I'm so sure it's going to be good--but work and life keep interfering. So I went back this weekend and caught up with this masterful mid-length story from 2006, which I hadn't previously read.
A lighthousekeeper's daughter and her widowed mother get visited, on their island--where the only thing that seems to grow is plants from the seed packet their husband/father had in his hand when he drowned--by the ghost of the husband/father. Who keeps melting into a puddle. And who one night brings a younger ghost-sailor as a guest. The ghosts are gentle, sweet, alive, full of stories. And they feed on breath. From the mouths of the living, or stolen from just-used coffee cups.
As in the reconfigured fairy tales of W.B.Yeats, and as in most of my favorite ghostly tales, everyone in this story tells a story (one character even declares--as though stealing the breath from MY mouth--"Don't you think we've gotten awful complacent in our society about story?"). The emotional landscape is wild and weird and full of shadows, even though the characters themselves are all somewhat detached either by grief or by no longer living (and "a remembered emotion is like a remembered taste, it's never really there"). The end is scarier than you expect, and also a sort of sweet, and as to what, exactly, happened, and whose story was closest to truth, and whether that ending is happy or sad, and for whom...
Great, great story. She's a major writer. Go read her.
