The stories in Eliza Robertson’s first collection are filled with lush flora and fauna, both real and figurative. In the eerie opening story, which takes place “the day before the flood”, “fat toads fall from the sky and fill the hanging geranium pots”, while in a “ripe, photosynthetic bathroom”, stencilled irises and lilacs seem to come to life, “the roots on the wall silently sucking”. A girl watches through the window as her neighbour “kneels on his carpet and kisses a giant, black-shelled crab”, then realises it’s an air mattress – his contingency plan for the flooding. Elsewhere in the book, birds abound, not only in the wild but also in the dance acts of strippers or beauty queens: one is “the type of girl birds perch on: no seed, just … clavicles for landing”. A little niece on Skype “thrusts her chin at you” like a plant craning at the sun: “Heliotropism, I think it’s called.”
Feathers and slime aside, there aren’t a lot of resemblances between the stories: Robertson, a much garlanded young Canadian writer – “We Walked on Water”, her winning entry for the 2013 Commonwealth short story prize, closes the book – displays her range almost to a fault. Assured and ambitious, she tells stories backwards (“Where have you fallen, have you fallen?”) or in the style of an 18th-century conduct book (“Thoughts, Hints, and Anecdotes Concerning Points of Taste and the Art of Making One’s Self Agreeable: A Handbook for Ladies”), from the point of view of a child, or of a geographer addressing his dead fiancee. She describes how to band a hummingbird, save cranes from drowning, prepare buttered rum, pole dance (“she would dab her palms with acetone for better grip”). Most of these stories swerve to avoid a neat ending, staying, as Robertson writes in the closing line of “Electric Lady Rag”, in the hinge of this moment, before it tipped into the future or back into the past” (this particular moment involves a man embracing a woman in a half-King Kong, half-Fay Wray costume).
That’s not to say that nothing happens, more that the stories end in the stretch of quiet just before or after a significant event takes place. Quite a few are set in the aftermath of a death, which Robertson implies is a natural way to lose the plot; the last paragraph of the final story begins: “I read once that grief is like waiting … Waiting for Act III, the plot twist. Like when you drop a twig into the stream and it never emerges on the other side of the bridge.”
Robertson graduated from UEA’s renowned creative writing programme, and occasionally shows a weakness for workshop-worn tricks – involved metaphors and similes that seem a bit precious, or don’t add much to what they describe. Clouds “blocked the sun like the pelt of a lint trap”; the flesh of a mastectomy scar is “folded neatly and stitched like a muted mouth”. On impulse, a man steals a trailer containing a tiger and two camels while running away with someone else’s heavily pregnant girlfriend, Blanche; she sleeps in the tiger cage while he gazes at her belly: “the only stretch of flesh unsunned – it sits on her hips like a freshly domed igloo. As though every night for the last seven months, invisible children sleighed over her pelvis and added fistfuls more snow, packing the ice smooth with seal-mitted palms.” This makes you long for more of Robertson’s dialogue instead: “I don’t want to be the one who sends them back to the zoo,” says Blanche to her companion when she discovers the beasts. “They trade these guys like hockey players.”
There are 17 stories in the book, which would have been more than enough for a good collection without the weaker few (the slightly twee “Ship’s Log”, for instance, narrated by a little boy mourning his grandfather and digging his way to China through his grandmother’s backyard). Some of the simplest stories are the most appealing. “L’Etranger” sketches the narrator’s interactions with her Ukrainian flatmate, Irina, during a stay in Marseille: here again we find slimy nature (slugs), intimations of mortality (a lump in the breast), and uneasy social relations (a power struggle via light-switches and wireless routers, culminating in a prank: slugs again) – and all crammed into eight sad, comical pages.
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