The Void By Bryan Healey Copyright © 2012 Createspace ISBN: 978-1463507886 148 pages Imagine yourself in a coma, dead and unconscious to everyone around you for the past six years, and then suddenly able to hear and think. But that’s all. No sense of smell or sight or touch. Beyond what is given me by those around me, I can experience nothing but what I am able to cobble together using old memories and my old knowledge and my old beliefs and ideals, and the product always lacks the pull of the sonorous echo of Jenny’s ever melodious words, drifting into my ears like rose petals against a stiff breeze. Her voice makes me see color, see music, to see a lively painting, rolling fields of yellow and green cast across a blue, formless sky; she reminds me that there is a world, and at least part of it still cares that I am here. This is The Void, a world narrated by Max Aaron in this short novel by Bryan Healey. In it, Max’s narrative alternates between processing his current surroundings and reflecting back to major events in his past, with a couple of dreams thrown in, in a kind of stream of consciousness style. There are no line or chapter breaks. The dominance of single-sentence paragraphs makes for a quick pace. The transitions between past and present come unexpectedly and are key to making the experiences related by such a passive protagonist interesting for a reader. A certain word or phrase from a visitor launches Max’s mind to his past, whether to his time in the military, meeting his wife, Jenny, watching the birth of his son, or the purchase of the car that son now wants. I remember buying that car; it was a beautiful, sunny Saturday, driving to the address that I found in the newspaper, boasting a cheap sports car for sale. I needed a new car. “Good afternoon!” I smile at the man. “Howdy!” “I hear you have a car for sale?” “Indeed, I do,” he beams and motions for me to follow him into his garage. Briefly, I consider that maybe he is going to kill me, and I wonder if I would be able to defend myself… But then his garage door opens, and before me is the most gorgeous hunk of metal and leather that I have ever seen, glistening with the little sunlight suddenly available from the outside opening. It was black, convertible. It smelled magnificent. I would have paid him whatever he asked… “He always loved that car.” I’m glad he’ll have something from me…
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What solitary sadness Max must feel hearing people speaking about him. Their obliviousness of his limited consciousness makes them say things in his presence they wouldn’t otherwise. It works well as a device because it’s not distracting; instead, one wonders how he can endure the impact of their words alone. This is most distressing when his wife and son make the decision to pull his feeding tube to let him die. But more powerful was the one-way interaction between Max and a night nurse, Sarah,
whose own tragic circumstances affect Max even more deeply, it seemed. It’s not all so gloomy and there are light moments. A bit of suspense too. Several memories of reveal incidents of danger or peril. With each, you wonder, was this the event that put him in the coma? The answer does come but for me it was rather uninspired, like the rest of his previous life, which was rather unoriginal in dramatic terms. Perhaps that was on purpose to ensure his current circumstances take precedence. The big moral issue of the right to ‘pull the plug’ in such a situation is, curiously, not explored. Perhaps by accepting the possibility of Max’s ‘Void’ an argument could be constructed against mercy killing on the basis of his consciousness. The mercy, then, would be for the family as Max would be content continuing to live indefinitely within his memories and hearing. But he accepts their decision gracefully; what choice does he have? Perhaps there could have been an outsider fighting to keep Max alive. This lack of actual conflict creates another void, a literary one. But I can appreciate why this route wasn’t taken. It would have made for a far different story, one that would have struggled to sustain the style, and risked becoming too conventional. As it is, The Void is an interesting and creative piece. But because of its narrow scope and shortness, I’d hesitate to call it a novel. I read this from an ARC epub file, which contained proofing errors and inconsistent line spacing; i.e. the excerpt above was double spaced in the book while other sections were single-spaced. I assume these issues will be resolved by the time this review is posted and The Void is generally available. By Wade Alan Steele Copyright © 2011 Createspace ISBN: 978-1456569389 209 pages Story collections, like CDs, often share a theme or tone related to the title. In that sense, the title of Wade Alan Steele’s collection, A Sudden Dominance of Shadows, correlates to the opaqueness of many of its stories that delve into the murky psyches of its protagonists, with mixed success. The first two stories, Farewell and Avalon and Beneath, are conventionally literary and fully developed, with an eerie atmosphere that make them compelling and engaging. Sexual undertones add to the creepiness in an unsettling but positive way. Both finish well and contain dialogue that’s nicely balanced with the narrative. Also, they exhibit one thing that’s so often lacking in stories: characters engaged in concrete actions that contribute to the plot. Unfortunately, these traits do not carry through to many of the other stories, which are often too self-consciously literary. The influences of Carver, Kafka, and Woolf ring through, but not always to good effect. Taking the Sandwich, a story about a business person eating a sandwich meant for the homeless, echoes Maupassant’s wonderful Boule de Suif, but lacks that story’s subtle pathos and humanity. Not to mention a lead character to care about, which is a clear distinction between the weaker stories and the stronger ones. We’re Delicious, a story about a chef reality show, turns on a grisly but erotic twist, enticing the reader. But then it spoils it by putting the protagonist in the background in favour of a too-on-the-nose effect. In Uprisings, our concern for the main character seems wasted when we discover the object of her concern so despicable we lose respect for her. There is redemption with the last story, an odd piece of self-absorbed obsession called The Bird Spoke. It wasn’t my cup of tea yet I could still appreciate the writing. It was the most evolved piece in the collection and the best example of the sophistication the author is capable of. It was the cleanest too, in terms of proofreading. I’m not sure if the lack of commas throughout The stories was an intentional style choice but it often made for cumbersome reading. I would argue that in some cases the lack of a comma was indeed a grammatical mistake. I might not have singled this out if not for the presence of other mistakes and inconsistencies in the text. Misaligned indentation, misplaced apostrophes and quotation marks, missing words—all easily fixable with more thorough proofreading—did detract from the reading experience for me. That's why I had to write my essay about this stories to warn you about their quality. The disparate styles of the stories in A Sudden Dominance of Shadows makes the book like a CD collection of B-Sides. The imagination and creative ability of the author is evident but many pieces are either too direct and literal or too obscurely inaccessible. The balance achieved in the first two stories and the last would have improved the others. |
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