\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWsuggested, is sometimes aware of "theVoid," and senses that her "minute byminute" way of life is somehow moribund.But she is finally not a very substantialcreation. And her author expressesso little scepticism about thebanality of her ideas and doings — parties,picnics, gallery openings — that thepotential excitement of his theme is overwhelmedby the ennui created by thiswoman's string of appointments with thepicturesque.Pearson's storyteller is like a conspiratorwho manipulates wish and actualityto disorient his victim. But this fine intrigueis wasted in a novel which offersas a protagonist a character who seemsto belong in a TV mini-series. UnlikeThe Elizabeth Stories, this story makesthe consequences of passion minor, despitetheir high sensation and aparent newsworthiness.JANET GILTROWTHE GAIETY OF DREADLEÓN ROOKE, Sing Me No Love Songs I'll SayYou No Prayers: Selected Stories. General,$22.95.THESE SIXTEEN STORIES have all beenpublished before in magazines or inRooke's earlier collections, but what ofthat? It is interesting to read them againin this new arrangement and to see howthese particular stories map out the configurationsof Rooke's fictional territory.That territory is defined not so much byrecognizable character types, though theyare his usual misfits who have, as he onceremarked, "a kind of kissing cousinsodour" clinging to them; nor is it definedby the persistent motifs of death andabsence and failure; it is found in thedefinition of spaces rather than places asRooke shows us how desperate imaginationsget to work on everyday reality,transforming it at least momentarily —something like the Yeatsian "gaiety transfiguringall that dread." What fascinatesus are the shifts whereby familiar thingsare made to look different as his storiesgive these alternative worlds reality.Though these worlds may well be illusory(practically all the stories have a strongvein of fantasy), while we are inside thestory we are caught, forgetting that theseinventions are as fragile and vulnerableas the characters who create them.Rooke's technical dexterity is obvious ashe ranges from conventional naturalismin the first story through satire to fantasy,fable, and fragmented postmodernist narratives,ending with a wryly comic revisionof English history. It is refreshingto find in such carefully crafted fictionsno hint of the usual modernist and postmodernistself-consciousness, no meditationon the necessity of fiction-making forexample; instead the narrators' voices aredissolved in the stories they tell. Whenjuxtapositions occur, they do not throwus outside the fictions but register thediscomfiture of the narrators at what cannotbe easily accommodated within theirimagined structures.Many of the stories are about absence,loss, and death: "Mama Tuddi DoneOver" and "The Birth Control King ofthe Upper Volta" are crucially dependenton deaths, while "Break and Enter,""In the Garden," and "Lady Godiva'sHorse" register loss more obliquely, likethe wife in "Conversations with Ruth:The Farmer's Tale" who "knows she haslost something she never knew she'dfound." Common motifs are treated verydifferently in different stories, and it isone of the charms of this collection to seethe number of variations on a themewhich Rooke can play. "Break andEnter" is an odd fragmented story toldby the wife of a couple who have squattedin Gore the Critick's house, always insearch "of livelihoods that inspire." Thewoman's mind teeters between delusions165