The Walking Wounded
[In the following review, Mackay praises Thomas's presentation of emotionally scarred women in The Wild Blue Yonder.]
Pointing out his own romantic shortcomings, a husband in one of Audrey Thomas's new short stories ruefully asks his dissatisfied wife, "Whoever heard of a prince with a bald spot on the top of his head?" She replies, bitterly, "Whoever heard of a princess with stretch marks?" For all of the characters in The Wild Blue Yonder, Thomas's third short-story collection, life is distinctly unlike a fairy tale. Flesh turns to flab, romance burns to ashes, and husbands move on, usually to younger, more attractive women. At mid-life, Thomas's heroines find themselves chalking up more losses than gains, and the past will not leave them in peace. "When someone you love tells you that it's over, when you've been married to that someone for 20 years, something terrible and permanent happens to you," says the respectable grandmother, about to make a fatal mistake in "Blue Spanish Eyes." She adds, "You never get over it; all you can do is get around it."
In her quirky, absorbing tales, Thomas reveals the extraordinary inner lives of apparently ordinary people. Employing a forceful, immediate style, she cuts straight to the heart of the matter. A radio playwright as well as a fiction writer, Thomas uses dialogue and interior monologue extensively and well. Whether the setting is a sickbed, a hot tub or a hellishly crowded train, she brings an intensity to her stories that leaves little breathing space for intellectual or emotional detachment.
In settings that range from Africa to New York City, and from Great Britain to Canada's West Coast, where she has lived since 1959, the stories in her latest collection artfully demonstrate that human misery is universal. Lives shatter into pieces and cannot be fixed; a sense of isolation and rootlessness prevails. In her West Coast stories, the author amusingly conjures up an exotic countercultural atmosphere where superannuated hippies drink home-made wine, smoke cannabis and seem never to lack sex partners. But even those free spirits are anything but content. In "A Hunter's Moon," a divorced Vancouver playwright named Annette reflects on her inability to find peace of mind: "She felt like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea. 'Help Me.' Help me do what?"
Yet rather than succumbing to self-pity, Thomas's characters tend to persevere with spirit and humor. Veronica, who is undergoing unpleasant X-rays for a possible malignant breast tumor in the story "Compression," diverts herself with elaborate word games about real and imaginary saints. She was, Thomas writes, "a woman who dealt with scary situations by telling herself jokes or by talking too much." In "The Happy Farmer," Janet, a divorced woman living on an island in British Columbia, is harassed and insulted by a belligerent male neighbor. In the end, she turns the tables on him, and learns a lesson in self-respect. Strengthened by the experience, she wonders, "What was the matter with her that she'd been so afraid of him?"
On the whole, men do not fare very well under the author's frankly feminist scrutiny. Faithless ex-husbands are mentioned only in passing. And several male characters are noteworthy mainly for their fatuous self-absorption. Larry, in "A Hunter's Moon," is typical: he hurts his girlfriend, Annette, by attempting to seduce her best friend, Zöe, under her nose. Still, Thomas's female characters have no illusions about the men in their lives. Comforting Annette later, Zöe says simply: "Listen, Annette, do we really like them? I'm not talking about sex, I'm talking about like."
Perhaps to even the score, Thomas has made a man the most remarkable and engaging character in the book. "The Wild Blue Yonder," the finest work in the collection, is a daughter's loving recollection of her father, a warmhearted Second World War navy pilot. With a skilful eye for color and detail, Thomas evokes the charmed period in the child's life, before her father goes to war—a time of silly jokes, Saturday matinées, banana splits in the local tearoom and faith in fighting for one's country. When her father returns from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp broken and disillusioned, the child's world also falls apart. But by cherishing the memory of her father's generosity, the daughter keeps the best part of him alive in herself.
Ultimately, the stories are testimonies to individual courage. Thomas presents life as a lonely path, in which kindness and fellowship, however welcome, are of limited use. In focusing on the enormous strength and spirit needed to get through life with dignity, Thomas has created a compassionate tribute to those who soldier on in a world in which there are no happy endings.
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