When tragedy strikes its lightning blow on the unsuspecting—preoccupied as they are dodging the everyday bullets of fate and inopportune circumstance, making their way towards an easeful evening and the prize of a good night’s sleep—even the solid citizen, with all their ducks in a row, can collapse like the proverbial house of cards into a messy heap that cannot easily be swept up. For those already on a crash course with the uncomfortable realities regulating our lives, it can a psychic dismemberment of epic proportions, slicing both body and mind into appetizers for the hungry demons at heartbreak hotel.
Reading Catherine Black’s narrative of such an unwinding I was reminded of Doris Lessing’s phrase Briefing For A Descent Into Hell. Her protagonist’s sudden urge to break free from the oppressive routines and empty comforts of urban life and journey forth into the supposed freedoms of the open road, the one Kerouac and his contemporaries celebrated as they joyfully ditched the plastic paradise put up by post war optimism and reconstruction, soon turns sour. Abigail’s flight from a broken past and the responsibility of rebuilding is such a descent.
From being a master of evocation, the shifting textures of mood and atmosphere, in such earlier expressions as Bewilderness, [Black] has moved to the role of master descriptor…
We follow her as she journeys south, a mythical south as much as a geographical one, the progressive warmth melting off the icy shivers and hardened armours of a Toronto winter, layer by layer until she’s sweating in the heat and humidity of small town Mexico with a motley crew of eccentrics, reprobates and ne’er-do-wells in and around the posada she lands in. With remarkable and convincing sensitivity Black evokes the transient community of North American escapees and poverty stricken Mexicans using booze, dope and casual sex to conceal the barbs of guilt and grief and somehow convince themselves that in desperate dissolution they are cleverly managing their fun intake. We have all seen the like, one way or another, sometimes in our own back yards.
In spite of despair and disgust felt in equal measure, she is yet unable to extricate herself from the destructive self-pity that brings her repeatedly to the borders of that land of no-return, most notably the typhoid fever then sweeping the community. Of course no suffering, either casual or self-inflicted, can purge the poisons of grief, hate and regret from her system. Upchucking from both ends after all night partying can rid the system of the crap one imbibes but eviscerating deep psychic disturbance is quite another story, one that Black enumerates with a knowing precision.
From being a master of evocation, the shifting textures of mood and atmosphere, in such earlier expressions as Bewilderness, she has moved to the role of master descriptor, one who accurately inscribes the shades and shadows of character as well as the peculiarities of landscape and community with a stamp that is at once individual and universal:
The morning she surfaced was calm. Everything – the road, the lake, the car mirrors and sunglass lenses, - were ‘verre eglomise’. The light in patina, the rippled sky, silver and peeling. The lake murmured, rubbed its hands, paced a little to shore, turned back only slightly, then again to shore. Only the lake knew for twelve hours, but didn’t know what to do about it. (Bewilderness, Water Piece)
I went looking for a cantina after that. Let’s be clear: I needed a place to stay but more immediately I needed something for my nerves and the lightning bolt pills were all gone. So I made turns around buildings that looked like they housed all kinds of stories. You could sense it, like they were whispering to each other. Angels and gargoyles perched everywhere, gazing down with their wings outstretched or folded around themselves. Calico cats sunned their fur on sheets of corrugated metal stacked on the rubble of abandoned homes. Their wild kittens skittered away from under fallen beams as I passed. Sisters, I thought, all of them. (Blessed Nowhere)
Abigail’s splashing in the swamps of her own psyche, searching for shores of safety, is rendered with the same relentless accuracy as the minutiae of architecture and culture, the motivations and hidden desires of others. Black observes with the cool detachment that objectivity requires; detached but not indifferent. A protagonist’s crisis is the performer’s ballet. She dissects with a scalpel not a trowel, resisting the temptation to heap on local colour by the shovelful, as Malcom Lowry was once famously accused of in the Mexico of Under The Volcano. When her buried past returns, it appears not with a vengeance to excoriate guilt but with a chance at forgiveness, both of self and other, and a redemption that shows signs of settling about a newer shinier self, an inner radiance that might well be mined with a steady determination.
Letters, those ancient troves of cursive writing on paper, the forgotten ancestors of emails, can still link strangers and make them look alike. The olive branch that begs for attention and resolution yet has its uses. With such a trajectory she could well morph into a novelist of distinction without once dipping into that cozy CanLit cliché, the multi-generational family saga, and one anticipates the stages of that journey, whether text or video translation, with pleasure.
Catherine Black is an Associate Professor at OCAD University, where she was a co-founder of the Creative Writing BFA program. She has published two collections of prose poetry: Lessons of Chaos and Disaster, and Pat Lowther Award-nominated Bewilderness. Her lyric nonfiction novella, A Hard Gold Thread, was nominated for the ReLit Award. This is her first novel.
Publisher: Guernica Editions (October 21st 2024)
Paperback: 9″ H x 6″ W x 1″ L | 250 pp
ISBN: 9781771839112
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- gordon phinnhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/gordon-phinn/
- gordon phinnhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/gordon-phinn/
- gordon phinnhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/gordon-phinn/
- gordon phinnhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/gordon-phinn/
