[In the following review, Barnwell praises The Wild Blue Yonder, observing that Thomas expertly portrays women made cynical by the brutality of the male arena.]

Audrey Thomas's latest collection of short stories is an often-painful exploration of gender roles as they have been constructed in the post-Second World War period. The stories themselves are woman-centred, candid and at times deeply disturbing, revealing the frightening vulnerability of women to the "charming" ineptitude and, indeed, the murderous misogyny of men.

Many of the men are "blue-eyed boys" who, with their innocence, child-like playfulness and feckless attitude to work, manage to make the women in their lives seem cynical, uptight and humourless by contrast. They are "enchanting" even though their charm is usually a disguise: they feign soft voices and Texan accents, pretend to be Peter Pan, Andy Griffith or Mr. Peanut. But they are also dangerous: they are no respecters of a woman's boundaries, assuming they can enter her home without knocking, offer her unsolicited advice, seduce her, leave her to cope with the practical details of life, and even murder her.

What makes these actions all the more appalling is that they are all committed by "nice" men, the kind who help women with their luggage, who pay them compliments and appear solicitous of their well-being. In "A Hunter's Moon", the older Zoe and Annette wonder why the young men who "hang around" them all hate their mothers. Zoe guesses "Because mothers are so powerful", to which Annette replies: "But that means they hate women like us". This is the painful conclusion which the younger women in the collection of stories have not yet reached, and which the older women can no longer avoid.

In "The Happy Farmer" Peter will not take no for an answer. Literally walking into Janet's life, he undertakes his seduction/invasion with a soft voice and leftover-hippie "laid-back" manner. He leaves little gifts, notes with free advice signed "Peace, your friend Peter" and shares intimate details of his life which Janet would rather not hear. Frustrated by her resistance, he pointedly leaves a bottle of Blue Nun wine on her doorstep and dope-spiked mash for her chickens, whom he refers to as "Don Giovanni and the ladies". Although she experiences his advances as "mental harassment" and wishes she could call the police for help, she realizes that they would probably just laugh at her and "give her a kindly lecture about neighbours in the country having to get along with one another". Like all "humourless feminists" who do not find misogyny funny, she feels blamed for being uncooperative. After he plays a particularly revolting practical joke on her, he expects to be forgiven, claiming, "I just wanted to break through that wall you keep around yourself—see you really express yourself emotionally." Clearly believing himself to be a latter-day Don Giovanni, he feels justified in breaking through her protective "wall". From a woman's perspective both Don Giovanni and Peter are would-be rapists masquerading as "charmers".

Janet, however, is able to turn the tables on Peter, unlike the older and more vulnerable Margaret in "Blue Spanish Eyes". Left by her husband of 20 years, she thinks: "you become frightened of things that never frightened you before … you have lost trust." While she sees that the young man who is so kind to her on the train is "loose-limbed, dangerously so, as though he needed to be re-strung", she prefers to believe the message of his eyes which were "a bright, clear, cloudless blue". Her ingrained inclination to trust men overcomes her intuitive mistrust of this one. In this collection of stories, he proves to be the most sinister of the charming men ("I promise to be entertaining") who hate their mothers and hence all women.

The last story, from which the title of the collection is taken, is narrated by a daughter whose adored father had "gone missing" in the war and returns "risen from the dead—and strange". He tells her that had he not been taken a prisoner of war he would have deserted, that "it's too wild up there in the wild blue yonder". His refusal to assume the gender role of soldier and bravely coping, wounded veteran leads him to take several "inappropriate" jobs: one as a Mr. Peanut and later one as an orderly in the local mental hospital. Justifying his choice of occupation to his wife, he says the whole world is mad and that he would "like to go and walk amongst the harmless mad and try to cheer them up". They, of course, prove not to be harmless.

If all the world is a madhouse, then the clinical symptom is male anger directed not only against women, but also against men who refuse to be "manly". The stories in Wild Blue Yonder, set in several different countries and time periods, and told from a variety of points of view, seem to confirm this diagnosis.