This Is Not Your City

Caitlin Horrocks

This Is Not Your City

Sarabande Books, 2011

4 1/2 Polychromatic Galaxy Skulls

A common thread throughout many of Horrock’s stories in This Is Not Your City is the exploration of an almost grotesque archetypal maternal figure.  At the end of “Zolaria,” the first story in the collection, the narrator forces her daughters to wade into a toxic lake.  “It Looks Like This” is told from the perspective of an 18 year old who is unable to finish high school because she needs to take care of her mom, who is suffering from rheumatoid arthritis.  “At the Zoo” focuses on a mother protecting her somewhat weak son from a somewhat violent grandfather.   While stories like “Zero Conditional” and “The Lion Gate” do not involve actual mothers, in both stories childless women take on maternal roles, half begrudgingly.  In “Zero Conditional” the main character is such an inept caregiver to a class of third-graders that she ends up killing the classroom pets and potentially harming the students.  It is not hard to imagine this young woman become the actual mother of “Embodied,” who suffocates her newborn in calm madness.  In the final story of the collection, “In the Gulf of Aden, Past the Cape of Guardafui,” the mother of a ten year old invalid writes her son postcards from a cruise ship hijacked by Somali pirates.  She and her husband took the cruise as a necessary respite from care-giving.  In the postcards she conveys both her ineffable love for her child and fantasizes killing him by feeding him too many pills.  Such a respite “made you infinitely less likely to smother your own child, to hit them, hurt them, hasten them out of this world” (168). 

The title story of the collection focuses on a young Russian mother who has recently become the mail-order bride of a Finnish man.  The story opens with the Russian mother, who barely speaks a word of Finnish, trying to communicate with Finnish police about the disappearance of her daughter (who also barely speaks Finnish).  The daughter failed to return after a camping trip with a young Finnish man.  It is a lovely, brutal story, with a fabulous scene in which the mother, still in Russia, is wearing her daughter’s clothing while her daughter photographs her, in order to appear sexy to potential Finnish husbands.  This kind of mildly abusive and desperate relationship between mothers and daughters is found again in “Sun City,” which is not in the collection (find it in The New Yorker, online or on magazine racks).  In “Sun City,” it’s not only mothers and daughters, but grandmothers, too, that rear up as grotesque figures of a maternal archetype.  However, in this story, the daughter ends up betraying her own mother, however symbolically, suggesting a way out of the oppressive family dynamic one finds in so many of the other stories.  

I’ve barely skimmed the surface of what Horrock’s stories are about.  They are about much more than grotesque maternal figures.  They are about abuse during childhood and adolescence (“Zolaria,” “It Looks Like This,” “Going to Estonia,” “Zero Conditional,” “Steal Small,” “At the Zoo,” “The Lion Gate,” “This Is Not Your City”).  They are about love relationships (“World Champion Cows,” “Steal Small,” and “Going to Estonia”).  And they are all about the power of imagination to both create and dismantle the horrors one faces in life.

The Last Light of the Sun

The Last Light of the Sun

Guy Gavriel Kay

Roc: NY, 2004

4 polychromatic galaxy skulls

One of the more impressive elements of The Last Light of the Sun is that it manages to maintain multiple narrative threads, shifts in perspective, and historical motifs without spiraling out of control.  When the stories of the Anglycn, Erlings, and Cyngael (Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Welsh, respectively), ranging from war, politics, love, and spiritual practices, get wrapped up, The Last Light seems to be a surprisingly short 490 pages.   

Kay is one of the more eloquent voices in contemporary fantasy.  His are not plot-driven epics between the forces of good and evil but rather character driven meditations on man’s fate in historical settings.  He writes eloquently, lets perspective shift from minor to major to minor characters with an abandon always on the verge of getting out of control.  It is a testament to his skill as a writer that the perspective never does get out of the control.  Choosing the miller’s view of a battle, rather than the king’s, prince’s, or priest’s, actually satisfies a thematic and historical subtext of the novel.  These kind of unpredictable meanderings are the literary risks that make The Last Light rewarding.  

It is also an entertaining lesson in history.  The basic plot corresponds to the reign of King Albert (849-899) and views his attempts to fend off and limit Viking raids from the perspective of 2 generations of Vikings (pre and post King Albert), the King and his friends and family.  Interwoven into this plot, and just as important, is the historical shift to Christianity.  The major Welsh character consorts with a fairy.  The “sun” in this case being Christianity and Wales the last place it reaches.  Everyone, apparently, interacts with fairies, though often in denial.  At the same time everyone is being converted to Christianity.  This is perhaps the most rigorous attempt I’ve encountered of trying to understand a pre-Christian world, where the forests really are enchanted, from a historical perspective rather than fantasy one.  It’s refreshingly lacking in melodrama.

This is “literary” fantasy—a writerly rather than readerly text.  The form of the novel performs and the reader will either interpret or get fed up.  As I mentioned, Kay writes complexly with charm.  His anxiety manifests in repetition, however, in a fear that the performance needs constant commentary.  The narrator is constantly reminding us that “small things, accidents of timing and congruence” form the structure of our lives (308).  Not just our lives, but history and novels too.  One might get a bit tired of this kind of philosophizing; one might also wonder how sentimental and Hamlet-like men and women were in late medieval period, were they really the first existentialists?  In the end though, reading The Last Light, one will be compelled to recognize beautiful and intense historical fantasy.