And now for something completely different … love/rock/compost by Kris Jamison
I didn’t set out to write an escapist book, a comfort read of art and love, of hope and finding one’s home and family of the heart, but that’s what love/rock/compost has turned out to be. It was an accidental foray into realism, as in real life I’m predominantly an author of fairly dark secondary-world epic fantasy. However, in December of 2016 (the 24th, 6 a.m., to be precise), the characters of Lindsey and Thomas, and their story, burst full-blown into life in my mind before I’d even had my first mug of tea or got my computer turned on to start the day’s work on the book I was supposed to be writing.
Maybe the underlayers of my mind were telling me I needed a sabbatical.
So, what’s this realist comfort read about? Music, depression, gardening, the family one grows up in, the family one creates along the way… It’s the story of two millennial men in love, sorting out their journey onward together.
First there’s Lindsey, who has a Master’s degree in botany. Knocked off-kilter by a couple of family tragedies on top of a childhood of drip-by-drip psychological abuse from some of his mother’s relatives, he dropped out of his academic life without doing the doctorate everyone, including himself, expected, and has drifted down to a retail job, which he has recently lost. He’s unemployed, with no better future he can see, struggling every day to stand up straight under a weight of quiet, grey, lost-ness. But in his life he has Thomas, who is far from grey, an exuberant, generous, intense guitarist and songwriter with a large and welcoming extended family whose band is doing not so badly, all things considered, and might, if only it were 1986 rather than 2016, be making a decent living from their music. Lindsey talks to his dead brother Raleigh — who may be a ghost, or, Lindsey fears in his darker moments, a symptom of mental illness. On the good days he believes his brother’s voice is his method of coping, of giving his own common sense a voice he’ll listen to. Is Raleigh a ghost? The story doesn’t resolve that. It doesn’t need to. Whatever Raleigh is, he’s become a part of Lindsey, part of his strength.
And then there’s Thomas, nicknamed “Tank” by his siblings for his habit of rolling over anything and anyone between him and what he wants. Thomas never takes his eyes off where he’s going and sweeps those around him into his orbit, but he listens, too. Sometimes he hears even the things Lindsey can’t say. Thomas is fireworks; Lindsey is something hiding in the shadows under trees. But Lindsey knows that Thomas is also still, deep water, and Thomas says that Lindsey’s truth lies in his art, the gardens he can imagine and create — he sees beauty and brings it living into the world, calls it out of nothing, out of thought and barren earth.
love/rock/compost is not a romance, in the genre sense, though it is quietly romantic. Lindsey and Thomas are a couple at the start; the story, which weaves past and present together, shows in its memories of the past their first encounter and how they found one another again years later. In their present they remain a couple, with friends and family close around them, weathering their storms, finding their way onward and taking strength from one another. That’s sort of the point of the story — not melodrama, but the way they find strength in seeing themselves through the love they’re given. It’s a defiance, too — artists with optimism, making a living? (Wasn’t this supposed to be realism?) Hard work, perseverance, talent… chance and luck play their role, just as in real life. It’s almost seeming like the last golden summer, now, 2016. A time before the world turned. So maybe love/rock/compost is a bit of an elegy, too, as well as a comfort read and a love story and a meditation on the power and necessity of the creative life, whatever one’s art may be. A hot golden summer, when the world could have taken another road.
About the Author
Kris Jamison was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, grew up just west of Kingston, and despite living in New Brunswick for much of her adult life, has limestone in her bones. Kris has been writing for only slightly fewer years than she has been reading, and as K.V. Johansen is the author of a number of critically-acclaimed works for adults, teens, and children. She also has slightly fewer guitars than Thomas Smith Gorev (which she plays rather less well).
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