\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWmen with no sense of public role andlittle certainty about private value, haghauntedby memories, closed and warywith the doll-bitch compound calledwoman yet needing the tactile warmth ofone in order to reach his goal of privatepeace. Setting is usually the submarginal,whether on a farm or in downtownToronto. Often the stories are told in thefirst person, as are the last three in SwimFor Your Life, and always the protagonistis struggling to achieve a sense ofself-worth and continuity while threatenedby time, memory, and death. Themale must shop with care amidst promiscuouslyavailable commodities such as sexand alcohol if he is to maintain thatideal consumers' co-operative, the family.Swim For Your Life is a little more mellowthan its predecessors, the centralfigure not quite so near the wall, the relationshipsrather more sentimental. Thereis Bailey's magpie realism and a writingstyle which, although powerful whenpresenting the protagonist's morbid andwitty inner dialogues or turbulent flashbacks,in straight narrative reminds oneof Maitland's daughter Gloria musing onpigeons: "They did not fly in the fluidway other birds did. They flapped theirwings furiously and wobbled into space."Earthen Vessels is Ann Copeland'sthird collection of short stories. Her first,At Peace, related stories set in a teachingconvent. The Back Room, her secondcollection, with the exception of one storyabout a cold-hearted perfectionist priest,urbanely deals with secular life. The titlestory is filled with exuberant humour,and in "A Woman's Touch" Gopeland isable to illuminate the shape of livesgoverned by the familial past with thesure touch of Katherine Mansfield in"The Daughters of the Late Colonel."Of the eight stories in Earthen Vessels,two are excellent: "Second Spring," and"Will." In "Second Spring" the speaker,a rather bitter woman who has left herteaching order for secular life and marriage,relates the story of Sister David, anintelligent woman who, when seduced bya promiscuous Jesuit, leaves her orderand takes an apartment to be availableto him. The speaker's tepid lie to herhusband, concealing the reception of aletter from her ex-sister, suggests that forboth women the late second springbrought little freedom. Like Claire Martin,Ann Copeland can treat the effectsof convent life with disillusioned clarity.In "Second Spring" the speaker commentson her response to a sexual advancefrom the same Jesuit, "a worlddevoid of taboos loses some possibilitiesfor feeling." The same might be said forCopeland's imaginative energies, thatthey need institutional confinement tokeep from becoming dispersed. Fourstories of secular life are rather flat allegoriesof moral progression or regression.Two stories, about a university extensionEnglish class in a prison (unnamed butprobably Dorchester) and about Awards'Night at a Catholic girls' school, arelively brief vignettes. But in "Will," astory of a convict given parole to attenda nearby university, the central characterdoes hold the reader's interest, throughthe gradual revelation that the ravagesof conscience and institutional routinehave left his inner life too brittle to survivein freedom. Spiritually he is amongthe dead, so that the discussion of capitalpunishment occasioned by a prison breakwhich he overhears in a barber shop, andwhich precipitates his collapse, is finallyirrelevant.Ann Copeland is a writer with a civilizedsensibility and a sense of her craft.If the stories in Earthen Vessels do notdevelop in range or technique beyondher previous work, they show a continuitywith it and are a pleasure to read.TOM MIDDLEBRO174