after silence
bones of the moon
black cocktail
a child across the sky
outside the dog museum
the panic hand
kissing the beehive
the land of laughs
the marriage of sticks
from the teeth of angels
sleeping in flame
voice of our shadow
The Marriage of Sticks and Kissing the Beehive
By Justina Robson
For Infinity
Plus
Jonathan Carroll is
the person I wish wrote my books. Endorsement enough, I feel, but I suppose
I have to say more than that. He has his particular skill - surrealism
- down to an art. In earlier novels of his, such as Outside the Dog Museum
and The Land of Laughs, it was quite well balanced, but in these two stories
his ability to just touch that Reality Setting dial and turn it a few
degrees widdershins has become more subtle and more disturbing.
Reading Carroll is the fantasy opposite of reading, say, China Miéville
or Mervyn Peake. We aren't in there to love the language and roll around
in happy orgies of sensory detail, fun though that might be. Here we just
read a story with enough words to say what has to be said and no more.
Occasionally the words are measured and distancing and they're never less
than very self-aware and laced with unspoken irony but the story itself
is sufficient, and in both these novels that's a mighty strange and scary
thing. I will not be summarising the plots and ruining it all here.
Both are written from the first person intimate viewpoint and are set
in Crane's View, New York. They are carefully crafted books and their
insights into the narrator characters are sensitively handled as these
people go through the full range of their experience-potential.
Both novels also feature one of Carroll's favourite characters, Frannie
McCabe the police chief of the small town, although he plays counterpoint
to the central characters, helping them in and out of trouble. I suppose
if you were writing a thesis you could make a lot of mileage out of McCabe
as the touchstone who defines the other people as they are 'sucked back'
simultaneously to the town of their childhood (Crane's View) and to realities
which, like the Levi's ad, are 'twisted to fit'. McCabe is a part of the
odd world, but he also insulates you against the worst of it as and when
he chooses to.
However, the two books do not deal with similar psychic or surreal themes.
The Marriage of Sticks is a woman's story of life, love and loss and contains
genuinely supernatural events which it would only disappoint you to understand
before reading the story. It begins innocently, as these things appear
to, with a return home for the School Reunion where the heroine Miranda
Romanac learns to her great dismay that her first love - a man whom she
had extensively and elaborately fantasised about meeting again - is already
dead. Her disappointment crashes into the barriers of shock when she sees
him shortly afterwards in New York itself. He appears to wave at her from
across the street.
Kissing The Beehive is a host of real-not-surreal life events centred
on the murder of a beautiful and talented young woman whose various reputations
as genius and man-eater seduce all those who knew her. This event has
trapped its witnesses inside a past which has an atavistic and quasi-supernatural
power to compel them, none less than the hero, whose confounded desire
and dreams about the dead girl make him vulnerable to the truth. The story
mesmerises the reader effortlessly as he revisits the past, unpicks its
secrets and discovers its horrible old bones.
Of all there is to enjoy in being led by the nose through a fascinating
labyrinth perhaps the best part is the knowledge that what you find won't
let you down. In both these tales the reader may be delightfully wrong-footed
by apparently psychopathic characters turning out to be only moderately
damaged goods in the most normal sense, leaving us questioning our own
projections about other people's behaviour. We also have to examine our
own natural inclination to paint narrators as the good guys when we're
shown elements of McCabe and our heroes as less than white by every turn.
There is death, there is violence, there is the subtle smell of rot and
brimstone as the books oscillate, keeping you teetering on the brink of
the real and the unreal right to the last minute.
God, it's just such fun!
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