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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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"I'm very grateful for the lucky accident that plopped me into the world during this particular junction of space/time because once in a while I get to read Paul Hong's writing." - Sally McKay |
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That quote by me appears on the back jacket of Paul Hong's new book, Your Love is Murder, Or the Case of the Mangled Pie, from Tightrope Books. Having been raised in a writerly setting, I am somewhat phobic about first books by new authors I am accquainted with and I rarely read them unless I absolutely have to. This one is different. Having read some of Hong's perfectly balanced, lateral, frightening and surprising stories in Kiss Machine magazine, I was waiting for the book with out-and-out anticipation. While reading it I experienced not one flinch, nor sigh of awkward pity, but rather found myself completely absorbed, disbelief suspended, with utter confidence in the author and eagerness to see what would happen next. The stories are hard to describe: they are short and precise, and a lot of them have animals. The animals are sometimes sort of supernatural, like the shark that appears to the boy in the hospital. Other times they are locked in the material world with the rest of us, like the dog who must borrow a child's plastic shovel in order to scratch complaints to his owner in the sand box. The stories are also about aliens. Neurologist Ramachandran talks about the zombie in our brain, a literal aspect of our physiological functionality that is impassive but observant. I recognize a certain deatchment in Hong's point of view, as if the narrator was just a visitor to this world, seeing through the eyes of a human boy. Except for the parts of the book that express a deep, confused and seething rage. This is the subtext, and it is linked to racial discrimination, to the infuriating impotence that comes from witnessing and experiencing human violence, and to the alienation of swimming through a culture's tropes and modes that do not speak to you, yet envelope you. In some cases the animals seem to proffer a bridge across a chasm. A creature that functions as icon in one set of mythologies (for instance a beaver) functions for our protagonist as a kind of existential entry-point to forming relationships with the world, or maybe, and this is where it all gets spooky, a relationship with the underworld? Ben Okri's Famished Road springs to mind, with his boy protagonist trapped between the spirit world and the living world, constantly courted and seduced by ghosts, barely clinging to the version of reality that is shared by friends and family. The struggles in Paul Hong's stories are handled with a light touch, with perfect tension, with lots of humour, and efficient yet unpredictable prose. He is an incredibly good writer, and I am an envious, admiring and enriched-for-the-experience die-hard fan. | |