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The Laboratory of Love
In this powerful suite of stories set in Spain, Africa, and North America, populated by wild dogs, tattoo artists, and lost boys, Patrick Roscoe's characters?lonely, damaged, nomadic?are outsiders in an often brutal and punishing world. In Roscoe's beguiling laboratory, science meets emotion in experiments that attempt to decipher the forces of love, loss, and longing. Patrick Roscoe was born on the Spanish island of Formentera. He is the author of many acclaimed novels and story collections published in Canada. The Laboratory of Love , his first new book in thirteen years, is his first to be published in the United States.
- GenresShort Stories
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
About the author
Patrick Roscoe
12 books4 followersatrick Roscoe was born on the Spanish island of Formentera, and spent his childhood in Tanzania, East Africa.
He was educated in England and Canada, then at sixteen ventured on his own into the world to embark on the quest which would be documented, in various forms, in his fiction.
Moving between the streets of California and the jungle of Mexico, he worked for several years (1981-1985) on early drafts of his first novel (and third-published book) God's Peculiar Care, and also wrote the stories of longing and loss that would form his debut collection Beneath the Western Slopes.
By the time of that first book's appearance (1987), Patrick Roscoe had spent several years completing his next book Birthmarks in Salobrena, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. In this period, he continued to pursue a nomadic existence that saw him drift with little more than his manuscripts-in-progress between Paris to Berlin, between Athens and Rome.
In 1988, he moved inland from Salobrena to Sevilla, where during the next four years he completed the final draft of God's Peculiar Care and wrote his fourth book Love Is Starving For Itself. From his base in Sevilla, Patrick Roscoe made increasingly frequent journeys to the Western Sahara of North Africa, each time venturing deeper into the desert, farther across the dunes.
In 1991, a decade after his journey began, the magic door for which he had been searching during those years suddenly appeared. Miraculously, this door stood open; miraculously, Patrick Roscoe was invited into the wondrous room beyond. Dazzled by the light emitting from inside, blinded by its power and beauty, he committed an error: instead of entering the magic door, he stepped through a door adjacent to it. Instead of entering the strong, warm and lasting light which he had travelled back and forth across the world to find, and to which each word of each of his books had served to bring him nearer, he discovered himself to be in a place of unremitting darkness and unrelieved cold. Call this the laboratory of love. His entry into the laboratory would be documented in the final pages of Patrick Roscoe's fifth book The Lost Oasis.
In the following fifteen years, Patrick Roscoe has published just two further books: aside from his novel The Lost Oasis (1995), there has been only the story collection The Truth About Love (2001), which presents the results of his experiments within the laboratory.
Patrick Roscoe currently divides his time between Mexico, Spain and North Africa, while also maintaining a Canadian residence; on another level, he has entered his second decade within the laboratory of love, which is always anywhere and everywhere and nowhere, and in which he remains both scientist and specimen. His prize-winning short stories continue to be widely published and anthologized in Canada, the US and England; some have been adapted for film and radio. There are several completed but not yet published book-length manuscripts (novels and short story collections - see in progress). With the novel The Reincarnation of Linda Lopez, the cycle of work that began with his very first set beneath the western slopes has been brought to conclusion; with The Brale Chronicles, he has moved from exploring his experience through myth and symbol to exploring those of earlier generations of family. It has become increasingly clear that, despite its variety and breadth and range, all his fiction documents Patrick Roscoe's investigation into the truth about love. As years pass, he holds onto hope that one day he will write himself free.
He was educated in England and Canada, then at sixteen ventured on his own into the world to embark on the quest which would be documented, in various forms, in his fiction.
Moving between the streets of California and the jungle of Mexico, he worked for several years (1981-1985) on early drafts of his first novel (and third-published book) God's Peculiar Care, and also wrote the stories of longing and loss that would form his debut collection Beneath the Western Slopes.
By the time of that first book's appearance (1987), Patrick Roscoe had spent several years completing his next book Birthmarks in Salobrena, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. In this period, he continued to pursue a nomadic existence that saw him drift with little more than his manuscripts-in-progress between Paris to Berlin, between Athens and Rome.
In 1988, he moved inland from Salobrena to Sevilla, where during the next four years he completed the final draft of God's Peculiar Care and wrote his fourth book Love Is Starving For Itself. From his base in Sevilla, Patrick Roscoe made increasingly frequent journeys to the Western Sahara of North Africa, each time venturing deeper into the desert, farther across the dunes.
In 1991, a decade after his journey began, the magic door for which he had been searching during those years suddenly appeared. Miraculously, this door stood open; miraculously, Patrick Roscoe was invited into the wondrous room beyond. Dazzled by the light emitting from inside, blinded by its power and beauty, he committed an error: instead of entering the magic door, he stepped through a door adjacent to it. Instead of entering the strong, warm and lasting light which he had travelled back and forth across the world to find, and to which each word of each of his books had served to bring him nearer, he discovered himself to be in a place of unremitting darkness and unrelieved cold. Call this the laboratory of love. His entry into the laboratory would be documented in the final pages of Patrick Roscoe's fifth book The Lost Oasis.
In the following fifteen years, Patrick Roscoe has published just two further books: aside from his novel The Lost Oasis (1995), there has been only the story collection The Truth About Love (2001), which presents the results of his experiments within the laboratory.
Patrick Roscoe currently divides his time between Mexico, Spain and North Africa, while also maintaining a Canadian residence; on another level, he has entered his second decade within the laboratory of love, which is always anywhere and everywhere and nowhere, and in which he remains both scientist and specimen. His prize-winning short stories continue to be widely published and anthologized in Canada, the US and England; some have been adapted for film and radio. There are several completed but not yet published book-length manuscripts (novels and short story collections - see in progress). With the novel The Reincarnation of Linda Lopez, the cycle of work that began with his very first set beneath the western slopes has been brought to conclusion; with The Brale Chronicles, he has moved from exploring his experience through myth and symbol to exploring those of earlier generations of family. It has become increasingly clear that, despite its variety and breadth and range, all his fiction documents Patrick Roscoe's investigation into the truth about love. As years pass, he holds onto hope that one day he will write himself free.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 28, 2014
From the outset, I understood that my investigations into love must be conducted through the medium of flesh: what I seek lies beneath the skin, below bone, under organs, deeper than blood, beyond scalpel’s reach.
I accepted, too, that this path toward the truth would not travel through lush surfaces or shapely limbs.
(Pure science must always practice discrimination for which no apology is required; embracing one theory means coldly denying others.)
Human beings who are encased within less aesthetically fortunate shells have always provided the richest raw materials for research.
My thesis is built upon a single fundamental principle.
When desire denied too long is finally fulfilled, when withheld beauty is belatedly possessed, when longing for wing and flight are at last unshackled: such ecstatic experience can unleash extraordinary reactions that originate from the deeply buried, molten core of love.
My physical self, this form shaped and honed for satisfaction, provides the catalyst.
***
The Laboratory of Love, Patrick Roscoe’s eighth book (and first since 2001), is a globe-spanning collection of thirty-three short stories—twenty-six which have been previously published—divided into five thematic parts. These stories explore, often with un-tempered vulnerability, the darker sleeves of love and its ability to simultaneously uplift and destroy.
In the first part, the stories contain wounded, troubled children, overwhelming tones of parental abuse and/or neglect, abuse from elders, and possession—sometimes positive, often negative—by religion, employing a fair amount of cloud, sky, and angel wing imagery. In “The History of a Hopeful Heart,” the story offers an abstracted point of view of a child taken in the night who proceeds to fall for his captor and the violence that exists between them, his old life nothing more than a ruined shadow. “Angie, Short for Angel” follows the idea of a prostitute as an angelic receptacle for men’s scorn and abuse—loss of child and parental abandonment are both heavily implied.
The second part is a linked narrative of sorts following the lives of Honey. Honey is a stripper who ran away from her hateful mother, but is forced to send her son back to live with her. The first story in this section, “Honey,” sets the stage for the difficult grandmother-mother-son interaction; the second story, “The Real Truth,” further explores the life of Honey’s child, Billy; “Eureka, California” shows Billy’s birth and Honey’s brief reprieve in the town of Eureka before eventually returning to the life she’d hoped to escape; “Lucky” gives readers a better glimpse into Billy’s life as he adapts new identities to create barriers as a defence against shitty, abusive authority figures, and he sees glimpses of what his mother must have been like as a child; and in “After the Glitter and the Rouge,” Honey returns home to her mother after having had acid hurled in her face to learn that Billy has disappeared.
Part III offers another series of linked stories, this time following the lives of a Canadian family living abroad in Africa while their mother is in a psychiatric hospital in Brale, BC. Like in the book’s second part, the stories in Part III shift between different narrators and points in time. “Beggars” introduces readers to Ardis, the mother, while “The Lena Tree” continues the narrative from Mitch, the father’s perspective, and “Wild Dogs” jumps into the minds of the children to set the stage for one of them following in their mother’s unfortunate footsteps. The opening story to this section, “Rorschach II: The Black Hole,” is littered with imagery of births and abandonment, of black holes and needles related, potentially, to depression, drug use, and other possible struggles; the poetry of the writing in this section masks the truth of these issues and whether they happen to be internal or external realities. The story “Chiggers” is the strongest in this section.
The fourth part of Roscoe’s collection contains the book’s strongest story in “The Sacred Flame,” which also marks the first time I felt there was genuine passion and belief in a character’s development—interestingly enough, it’s a malevolent force that seeks only to destroy:
I believe in the sacred flame. When my father asks me to spread fire, I obey quickly and without question. Ours is not to wonder why; we’re here to carry out His commands. On one level, my duty is to cleanse through fear. At every funeral, the survivors look like they’ve been shaken hard by their near escape from flame; despite television and Xanax, they’ll never feel safe again. Extreme heat destroys germs, eradicates disease. Sin purifies into cinder. Ash absolves. Sprinkle it on wounds and sores. Strike the match and set them free. Let them feel the holy heat, raise them with smoke above this sick and troubled land, dissolve them into divinity. Then my works is done and my Father allows me to leave. The traumatized town will not notice I’m gone. There’s never a goodbye.
As well in this part we reconnect with the family from the third part in the story “The Murdered Child,” which jumps ahead in time so that we may see Lily, one of Ardis’ children, living a similar, solitary life in Brale, BC, after her mother’s death.
The final, and largest, part of the book pulls the camera back to offer a wider perspective on the collection as a whole. “The Tattoo Artist” is an elegant, fable-like tale of the price of deliberately marking one’s body as different, as “other,” and how one is forced to live with past decisions and indiscretions. “Hieroglyphics I: Only the Bird Knows the Wing” and “Hieroglyphics II: Only the Wing Knows the Flight” are a two-part meta-narrative that read as if the author has split himself in two and is detailing a love affair between the two halves. These stories read on some level as if the author is issuing a statement about the world’s inability to recognize his talent for what it is, and how frustrating it is that he hasn’t figured out how to allow himself to love and accept himself for who he is. “The Truth About Love” documents what it’s like to fall in love with a serial killer, and the fear that the slightest sea change might turn the tides of their relationship in life-threatening ways. And in “The Laboratory of Love” we’re given a glimpse into the overarching, Quantum Leap-style narrative that runs through all others in the collection, examining the relationships of all the previous stories from a pseudo-scientific perspective.
I had a difficult time making it through The Laboratory of Love. The book itself feels as if it’s in the middle of an identity crisis; it doesn’t know if it wants to be a mosaic-like collection of short stories or a novel culled from disparate but similar pieces. In the past, I’ve found I have quite an affinity for mosaic collections, where several of the stories (or all of them) are linked in some way. In The Laboratory of Love, however, I felt the linked nature of the collection was actually to its detriment. Mostly this is due to the fact that the family at the heart of so many of the stories was never interesting enough for me to feel any sort of connection to them. And while each of their stories is written from the perspective of another member of the family, there is little to no differentiation in voice; they feel uniform, dull, and without life. Secondarily, the overarching efforts of the titular story, while at first blush an intriguing idea, were marred by its rather plodding nature and disaffected tone.
Additionally, Roscoe’s writing is uneven; while it is of a high intellectual measure throughout, it’s often overwritten, so delicately constructed and concise that it feels wholly inorganic—contributing, unfortunately, to the lifelessness of its characters. As a result of me not feeling drawn into the stories of these characters, I started noticing a regularly recurring writer’s tic—that Roscoe writes many of his descriptors and actions in three’s:
… the hallucinogenic heavens swam, swirled, spun.
Between the blank spaces, I visit the cash machine, the supermarket, the supplier of my medication.
Not by accident, from whimsy, for fancy.
This might seem inconsequential, but I noticed it enough times throughout the collection that it frequently pulled me out of what I was reading.
I suppose the most damning thing, however, is that despite the previous publication of most of these stories, only two or three of them really felt to me as if they could stand on their own—specifically “Chiggers,” “The Tattoo Artist,” and “The Sacred Flame.”
As I stated above, Roscoe’s writing is quite clean and elegant, but in the end there simply isn’t enough identifiable character or soul in The Laboratory of Love for me to recommend this book. It feels in many ways like a short fiction collection aspiring to be a weightier novel, but not succeeding at being either.
I accepted, too, that this path toward the truth would not travel through lush surfaces or shapely limbs.
(Pure science must always practice discrimination for which no apology is required; embracing one theory means coldly denying others.)
Human beings who are encased within less aesthetically fortunate shells have always provided the richest raw materials for research.
My thesis is built upon a single fundamental principle.
When desire denied too long is finally fulfilled, when withheld beauty is belatedly possessed, when longing for wing and flight are at last unshackled: such ecstatic experience can unleash extraordinary reactions that originate from the deeply buried, molten core of love.
My physical self, this form shaped and honed for satisfaction, provides the catalyst.
***
The Laboratory of Love, Patrick Roscoe’s eighth book (and first since 2001), is a globe-spanning collection of thirty-three short stories—twenty-six which have been previously published—divided into five thematic parts. These stories explore, often with un-tempered vulnerability, the darker sleeves of love and its ability to simultaneously uplift and destroy.
In the first part, the stories contain wounded, troubled children, overwhelming tones of parental abuse and/or neglect, abuse from elders, and possession—sometimes positive, often negative—by religion, employing a fair amount of cloud, sky, and angel wing imagery. In “The History of a Hopeful Heart,” the story offers an abstracted point of view of a child taken in the night who proceeds to fall for his captor and the violence that exists between them, his old life nothing more than a ruined shadow. “Angie, Short for Angel” follows the idea of a prostitute as an angelic receptacle for men’s scorn and abuse—loss of child and parental abandonment are both heavily implied.
The second part is a linked narrative of sorts following the lives of Honey. Honey is a stripper who ran away from her hateful mother, but is forced to send her son back to live with her. The first story in this section, “Honey,” sets the stage for the difficult grandmother-mother-son interaction; the second story, “The Real Truth,” further explores the life of Honey’s child, Billy; “Eureka, California” shows Billy’s birth and Honey’s brief reprieve in the town of Eureka before eventually returning to the life she’d hoped to escape; “Lucky” gives readers a better glimpse into Billy’s life as he adapts new identities to create barriers as a defence against shitty, abusive authority figures, and he sees glimpses of what his mother must have been like as a child; and in “After the Glitter and the Rouge,” Honey returns home to her mother after having had acid hurled in her face to learn that Billy has disappeared.
Part III offers another series of linked stories, this time following the lives of a Canadian family living abroad in Africa while their mother is in a psychiatric hospital in Brale, BC. Like in the book’s second part, the stories in Part III shift between different narrators and points in time. “Beggars” introduces readers to Ardis, the mother, while “The Lena Tree” continues the narrative from Mitch, the father’s perspective, and “Wild Dogs” jumps into the minds of the children to set the stage for one of them following in their mother’s unfortunate footsteps. The opening story to this section, “Rorschach II: The Black Hole,” is littered with imagery of births and abandonment, of black holes and needles related, potentially, to depression, drug use, and other possible struggles; the poetry of the writing in this section masks the truth of these issues and whether they happen to be internal or external realities. The story “Chiggers” is the strongest in this section.
The fourth part of Roscoe’s collection contains the book’s strongest story in “The Sacred Flame,” which also marks the first time I felt there was genuine passion and belief in a character’s development—interestingly enough, it’s a malevolent force that seeks only to destroy:
I believe in the sacred flame. When my father asks me to spread fire, I obey quickly and without question. Ours is not to wonder why; we’re here to carry out His commands. On one level, my duty is to cleanse through fear. At every funeral, the survivors look like they’ve been shaken hard by their near escape from flame; despite television and Xanax, they’ll never feel safe again. Extreme heat destroys germs, eradicates disease. Sin purifies into cinder. Ash absolves. Sprinkle it on wounds and sores. Strike the match and set them free. Let them feel the holy heat, raise them with smoke above this sick and troubled land, dissolve them into divinity. Then my works is done and my Father allows me to leave. The traumatized town will not notice I’m gone. There’s never a goodbye.
As well in this part we reconnect with the family from the third part in the story “The Murdered Child,” which jumps ahead in time so that we may see Lily, one of Ardis’ children, living a similar, solitary life in Brale, BC, after her mother’s death.
The final, and largest, part of the book pulls the camera back to offer a wider perspective on the collection as a whole. “The Tattoo Artist” is an elegant, fable-like tale of the price of deliberately marking one’s body as different, as “other,” and how one is forced to live with past decisions and indiscretions. “Hieroglyphics I: Only the Bird Knows the Wing” and “Hieroglyphics II: Only the Wing Knows the Flight” are a two-part meta-narrative that read as if the author has split himself in two and is detailing a love affair between the two halves. These stories read on some level as if the author is issuing a statement about the world’s inability to recognize his talent for what it is, and how frustrating it is that he hasn’t figured out how to allow himself to love and accept himself for who he is. “The Truth About Love” documents what it’s like to fall in love with a serial killer, and the fear that the slightest sea change might turn the tides of their relationship in life-threatening ways. And in “The Laboratory of Love” we’re given a glimpse into the overarching, Quantum Leap-style narrative that runs through all others in the collection, examining the relationships of all the previous stories from a pseudo-scientific perspective.
I had a difficult time making it through The Laboratory of Love. The book itself feels as if it’s in the middle of an identity crisis; it doesn’t know if it wants to be a mosaic-like collection of short stories or a novel culled from disparate but similar pieces. In the past, I’ve found I have quite an affinity for mosaic collections, where several of the stories (or all of them) are linked in some way. In The Laboratory of Love, however, I felt the linked nature of the collection was actually to its detriment. Mostly this is due to the fact that the family at the heart of so many of the stories was never interesting enough for me to feel any sort of connection to them. And while each of their stories is written from the perspective of another member of the family, there is little to no differentiation in voice; they feel uniform, dull, and without life. Secondarily, the overarching efforts of the titular story, while at first blush an intriguing idea, were marred by its rather plodding nature and disaffected tone.
Additionally, Roscoe’s writing is uneven; while it is of a high intellectual measure throughout, it’s often overwritten, so delicately constructed and concise that it feels wholly inorganic—contributing, unfortunately, to the lifelessness of its characters. As a result of me not feeling drawn into the stories of these characters, I started noticing a regularly recurring writer’s tic—that Roscoe writes many of his descriptors and actions in three’s:
… the hallucinogenic heavens swam, swirled, spun.
Between the blank spaces, I visit the cash machine, the supermarket, the supplier of my medication.
Not by accident, from whimsy, for fancy.
This might seem inconsequential, but I noticed it enough times throughout the collection that it frequently pulled me out of what I was reading.
I suppose the most damning thing, however, is that despite the previous publication of most of these stories, only two or three of them really felt to me as if they could stand on their own—specifically “Chiggers,” “The Tattoo Artist,” and “The Sacred Flame.”
As I stated above, Roscoe’s writing is quite clean and elegant, but in the end there simply isn’t enough identifiable character or soul in The Laboratory of Love for me to recommend this book. It feels in many ways like a short fiction collection aspiring to be a weightier novel, but not succeeding at being either.
July 15, 2014
The title might seem sentimental, and in some ways the stories are sentimental in the eighteenth century sense of the term, which argued that emotion was a way of knowing that was as legitimate (even more legitimate) than rationalism. Make no mistake, though: these are stories about suffering through love, and of love as suffering. Prostitution, serial killing, drug addiction, violence, murder, and betrayal are the stuff of love here. The language is highly poetic, and identities shift from one story to another, so that rather than being a book of linked stories, these are overlapping stories in which people mutate and events do not repeat so much as revisit themselves. I did at times grow weary of some of the tropes (love as language, synthaesthesia) but the general audacity and especially the willingness to treat narrative fiction as playground pleased me overall.
January 2, 2015
Written in the worst, most self-indulgent style of the “new” fiction: incomprehensible, averse to story, and deliberately opaque and self-referential. I honestly could not bear it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews