It really isn't too much and it isn't too soon. Well, maybe Green's collection of short stories Too Much, Too Soon , does reek of excess, but it is an excess the world needs. Her short stories are well crafted, and by this I mean there are satisfactory resolutions; fleshed-out characters whose dialogue clearly conveys their personal agendas; and a smooth relationship between plot and character. In a sense this style is quite traditional, with importance placed upon seamless dialogue between characters and setting. In other words, the characters are not free-floating, but emerge from particular environments. This is pleasurable and reminiscent of early Kate Chopin short stories, or of Jane Bowles. Sometimes stories that rely heavily on character dialogue—as do some of Green's—are very tedious to read. Green's stories here, however, are not. The women and men populating her pages are full of idiosyncrasies (otherwise why bother turning up on the page), and of intelligent conversation for the purposes of insight, not solely for moving the plot along.
Which really does bring me to the question of well-crafted stories. I need to point out that it isn't essential that there be much of a plot or storyline to make a good story. So many stories elicit pleasure and challenge by pinning the story on structure, and the internal experiences of the character, as in, for example, James Joyce's fiction. Green's stories do tend towards character development and structure, in ways very reminiscent of the French writer Marguerite Duras.
Duras has a tendency (in The Lover or The North China Lover ) to admit upfront how the story ends, though of course this is different from how the book ends. She privileges the reader by encasing the story in the narrator's retrospective. She manipulates narrative sequence by telling a tale through a jump backwards, and then forwards in time, but in such a way that the reader is caught in an eternal moment, like a photograph. This technique casts a shadow of inevitability throughout her stories, which in no way diminishes their power.
Likewise, in some of Green's short stories, the exit of the main character from the story is the start of the tale she weaves. In ‘Aunt Jessica and the Ostrich Tamer', we are already collaborating, as knowledgeable readers, with the inevitable absence of the main character, Aunt Jessica, whom we are told in the first paragraph ‘ran away'(1) .
Green's short stories, in particular ‘Aunt Jessica and the Ostrich Tamer', and ‘Madame Stefani's Fortune Telling Machine', explore a deranged carnivalesque, I might add Carteresque, as a tribute to the carnival themes of Angela Carter. These stories are stuffed with games, ‘wicked' women, and subversive romantics.
Her tales are resplendent with allusions to other writers, and artists. In ‘A Student of Life', her characters are generous either in their scorn or love of dead writers like ‘Hammerhead Hemingway' (31), or their reverential discovery of Anaïs Nin, and Vita Sackville-West. One of my favourite characters, other than Aunt Jessica from ‘Aunt Jessica and the Ostrich Tamer', is Karen. She's the woman most women dream of being, despite the whiff of self-destruction. She is wonderful, narcissistic, and loaded with handfuls of hope, sadness—and red lipstick.
She [Karen] once said bitterly: ‘We are creatures of pleasure—intellectual, physical, it is all the same. No-one does anything for love. All the great lovers are dead. What is the point of it all? There are no true poets left. And I am past my prime. (37)
I guess this character is not going to resonate with everyone, but if I were her friend I would tell her that she is poetry. Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said something along the lines of his greatest work of art was himself? Some people, whether fictional or actual, or a bit of both in the case of the better known ones, are poetry in motion. Even more crucially, certain characters, like Karen, actively shake up the lives of others in positive and profound ways.
Just as Karen epitomises wildness and life, Magnolita Rosario in Rey's The Spruikers Tale is all about captivity and death. Well maybe that's an extreme summary. But this is a book of abject extremes. Once she was a world famous trapeze artist, a beautiful child ‘born of a snake-woman and an Irish father' (11). Who we find later on has become exceedingly cruel and vindictive. We also learn how she changed in this way and we are given glimpses of her past splendour. ‘Besides, she had turned more than one head by simply batting her eyelids when showing people to their seats in the darkened aisles of the smelly music hall' (107) .
This is an awesome undertaking by Rey. The book is viscous, heavy — at once it suffocates me and uplifts me. Much like swinging on a trapeze. It's a clever technique, to pin the structure the way one might exhibit during a circus performance. It swings up and down, backwards and forwards.
We have the all-mighty eye of the Spruiker, like a strange mix of Cyclops and Pirate, weaving the tale of this damnable family, rotting on the edge of the desert in Australia. The Spruiker is a fabulous character, no less flesh and blood than the characters described. The Spruiker's tale, though it may not always be reliable, given the alcohol imbibed (10), is indeed a tale, and not a biography. This unreliable narrator aches to tell this story; enticing us, like a good ringmaster, as uncertain readers, into the blinding lights of the circus tent.
I'm yearning to entertain you my good friends. I'm yearning to do it. As your spruiker, aren't I obliged to tickle your fancy? You'd like to have fun as you listen to the tale of the poor sods whose story I'm telling you, and you also want to make fun of old One-eyed who's here to serve you. (37)
After all, the book is called The Spruiker's Tale , and not the tale of the ‘Queen Pigmy Circus', from where the circus characters come. So it is with this knowledge, already by page 37, that we have settled into our seats, not with the ease of trust, but with the hunger of ‘yearning' to hear an extraordinary tale. It doesn't disappoint.
While the book does trace the rise and disintegration of the various enclaves of the Queen Pigmy Circus and their children, it is capable of great moments of beauty, erotica and joy. We pass backwards in time as we see the heights that Magnolita once reached:
so important was it for her to soar—to soar! for such was her sole desire, her heart carried away by the swooning women, her belly clammy as she slid down from the brightly lit top of the tent, gliding down the smooth rope tightly fastened around her groin, stirring up the voracious appetite that had seized her up there to rush into her caravan to indulge it ...(26)
This book was originally written in French, and was short-listed for several awards. I can imagine the French liking this book. It's a little sordid, tragic, full of romance and off-centre. I'd like to think that its reception in Australia has been just as encouraging. Maybe her view of the Australian landscape is shaped through her early emigration here as a child. The landscape she depicts is alien and yet familiar. It's claustrophobic and evocative.
This is why we are comfortably prepared by the Spruiker. Because, just as the tale soars with joy, so the tale will show the depraved and monstrous aspects of humans, including murder, child abuse, torture, and greed. It would be naïve to assume that a one-eyed, drinking, parrot-wearing, peg-for-a-leg Spruiker would avoid giving us the nasty, ghastly snippets as well.
The show must go on, after all, and that might explain the Spruiker's drinking. Sequins to dazzle. Rum for courage.
Misbah Khokhar is a poet. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems, ‘No Middle Path' for her MA at The University of Queensland. She also performs poetry and music around Brisbane and N.S.W, and has had various releases overseas. She is interested in the idea of poetic terrorism, cabinets of curiosity, and art that transports, shifts, enacts, transcends. She believes in beauty and truth and revolution.