Goodbye Harold, Good Luck
[Garebian is an India-born Canadian writer and educator. In the following review of Goodbye Harold, Good Luck, he praises Thomas as a keenly sensual writer.]
In her introduction to this collection of 13 short stories [Goodbye Harold, Good Luck], Audrey Thomas describes how her mind works through correspondences. "Connect" appears to be a guiding principle in her fiction, and she moves into thought only through her senses—particularly her visual sense.
The sensorium gets full play in this collection, in which the various stories are given far-flung settings such as England, Scotland, Greece, and Africa. But it is not merely the exotic or the vagaries of local custom that engage Thomas: her fiction is most often centred on points of view and on what Joyce called "epiphanies" of truth. Whether it is a broken-hearted woman with a divided self ("The Man With Clam Eyes"), a brittle, old English spinster betrayed by physical infirmity and neurosis ("Miss Foote"), a middle aged mother "on the shelf" ("The Dance"), or a 12-year-old boy recoiling abashedly from the lurid sensuality of life ("Local Customs"), Audrey Thomas's protagonists draw us with them over the "stepping-stones across the floods of experience".
There are thin, pale, whimsical pieces here, but the writing at its best (as in "Degrees," "Relics," and the title story) is carefully braided, and the texture is shot through with the visceral intensity of her characters, who are either in mutiny against life or find life in foment against them. The social observation is keenly satiric, the evocation of mood is well controlled, and always there is at least one graphic image that summarizes each of the best stories.
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