Review of The Tall Owl And Other Stories by Colum Sanson-Regan, pub. Wordcatcher Publishing
“Then it happened. The rain shadows hit the shore. Manu jumped from the rocks onto the beach and started to run. He ran in a straight line across the strand. The locusts burst up all around him in a frantic clicking and buzzing cloud, rippling rich colour back into the sky. The thin rain was falling now and the swarm started to glisten into millions of tiny reflections of light. Rising up from the running shadow on the shore, the shimmering red wave pushed up from the beach to the ridge, advancing fast, and before Alan could take a breath, his body was blasted with the buzzing thudding insects. The noise was so loud now, like radio interference, and Alan couldn’t tell if the glittering locusts were moving up or down, like confetti on a victory parade. He tried to see the beach, to see Manu, but it was all out of focus, so he submitted. He closed his eyes and lifted his chin and listened to the thousands of tiny attacks on his body and his skin, concentrated on each little thud, felt carefully each time he was hit and felt on his face the soft shroud of rain that would soon cover everything.”
This (from “Invasion”) is a beautiful, sharp piece of writing, that’s the first thing to say about it. The second is that, like many a short story, it left me both intrigued and puzzled as to what exactly it was getting at. What happens is clear enough: three men, one severely disabled, on an unidentified island get caught up in a swarm of locusts which at first they treat as a noteworthy spectacle but which by the end looks as if it might be more dangerous. It is all very powerfully and memorably described, in fact for me it is the collection’s most memorable piece, but what it’s actually about is harder to pin down, though I do think that in the last sentence quoted above, the echoes from the end of Joyce’s “The Dead” cannot be accidental or without significance, especially in an Irish writer.
The fact that the island is never identified is fairly typical. There are stories which are precisely located, like “Bullets”, but most are deliberately left vague – eg “Poison”, which looked as if it might be somewhere in South America but in fact, according to the blurb, is Eastern Europe. In “What You Came Here For” we were in a big city where it was very hot and the streets were “canyons of concrete”, but there was nothing to locate it more closely and the name of the country, delayed some time, came as a surprise – I shan’t mention it because I think the point may have been to show how closely one set of concrete canyons resembles another. He also uses this technique of delayed information in the title story, where the gender of the protagonist is left uncertain for some time. When it is revealed, we see parallels with a real person, but the story is not about that person and we are not meant to identify the real person and the protagonist too closely, which I think is part of the point of delaying the information.
Identity and what constitutes it is a recurring theme. In “Born in a Fire”, a girl and her mother are both disfigured in different ways by an horrific accident they get caught up in while the mother is actually giving birth. The girl embraces her marred appearance as part of her identity, perhaps even the defining part – “I was born in fire” – and resists attempts to change it. The mother seems to find her own disfigurement irrelevant to who she is, until near the end when it becomes apparent that she has effectively submerged her own identity in that of her daughter. The first-person narrator of “Bullets” and the young friends he grows up with are forging identities for themselves and, sometimes, mistaking those of the people they see around them.
In “Cut” we have a narrative told through the notes of a film producer:
“Tight close on Simon, yes, working a treat. Drop the V/O? Find out in post, I guess. Tomorrow use jib shot for 17. Forecast is poor, overcast, occasional rain all day.
Winter is here.”
In this story the fictional portrayal of reality gradually seems to become more important to some of the characters than the reality itself. Though technically interesting, it takes careful reading, because the technique doesn’t lend itself to establishing character and it’s hard to get involved with them at first, which I suspect is why the notes become longer as it progresses.
His story titles are often subtle and illuminating – in “Cut” this is just what the director and his actor find impossible to do, while “Poison” goes deeper than its superficial appearance in the story (in connection with a snakebite) to the resentment festering at the heart of a relationship. “What You Came Here For” is another such. I always think this is a good sign, indicating that the author is clear in his own mind where he is going with the story and what matters in it. The only thing I wasn’t entirely happy with (if one discounts the odd typo) was the ending of “Silk”, which depends for its effect on something we know but which the protagonist does not. I felt this information had maybe been dropped into the story somewhat late and could have been better seeded.
Colum Sanson-Regan is a new voice to me and an interesting one. He has a wide range of subject-matter, theme and technique; he knows how to hook a reader into a story and his style is always striking, not least for its observational humour:
“The owl is tall, taller than the car. Tall and white. There’s a powder grey at the shoulders and the wings, and grey where the thin legs start, which bestow the odd look of a butler with orange amber eyes”.
