Word of the Day: Squalor
“The Perfume Sea” is a title that almost defiantly promises imagery that is like something from a fairy tale. A sea that smells like perfume? Or something to do with perfume, anyway. That is not how the author chooses to put imagery to use in the opening paragraphs, however. Just the opposite. It is almost ironic the way that dreadful squalor is engendered using imagery right from the start. Where’s the perfume, one has a right to inquire:
“In the Government Agent’s office, and in the offices of Bridgeford & Knight, Exporters-Importers, Englishmen sighed and wilted and saw from their watches that they could not yet legitimately leave for lunch. Pariah dogs on the road snarled over a cat corpse; then, panting, tongues dribbling, defeated by sun, they crawled back to a shaded corner, where their scabrous hides were fondled by an old man in a hashish dream. Footsteps on the cracked and scorching pavement lagged. Even the brisk shoes of white men slackened and slowed.”
Meanwhile...in Canada
“The Perfume Sea” is one of Laurence’s stories set in Africa while the stories in A Bird in the House represent the other half of that theme of divided loyalties: they take place in Canada. The squalor is certainly missing, but on a certain level, both these locales seem to share a single heartbeat:
“Aunt Tess, Chris’s mother, was severe in manner and yet wanting to be kind, worrying over it, making tentative overtures which were either ignored or repelled by her older daughters and their monosyllabic husbands. Youngsters swam in and out of the house like shoals of nameless fishes. I could not see how so many people could live here, under the one roof, but then I learned they didn’t. The married daughters had their own dwelling places, nearby, but some kind of communal life was maintained. They wrangled endlessly but they never left one another alone, not even for a day.”
The Dark Continent
Perhaps because they are set in a place that almost certainly most of her readers know only second-hand, most of the stories set in Africa that comprise the collection The Tomorrow-Tamer all commence with descriptive imagery setting the particular location both in literal and figurative terms. “Godman’s Master” offers a particularly good illustration of this trend with these opening lines:
“The sky cracked open like a broken bowl that held a sea-full. The moment the rain began, the thick heat vanished. Humans and animals would shudder in the unaccustomed cool until the returning sun made the drenched foliage steam. Hours passed, and the dense rain went on, soaking the palms down to their fibrous roots, turning the forest moss spongy and saturated, causing the great ferns to droop like bedraggled peacocks.”
You Can’t Go Home Again
The interconnected stories comprising A Bird in the House chart the development of the narrator over the course of several years. During that time, the march of progress takes its toll on her hometown so that the imagery describing it toward the end of the book is not exactly the same as that used earlier:
“The North End of Manawaka was full of shacks and shanties, unpainted boards, roofs with half the shingles missing, windows with limp hole-spattered lace curtains or else no curtains at all, chickens milling moronically in yards where the fences had never been lifted when they leaned and the weeds never hacked at or fought down. The cement sidewalks were broken, great chunks heaved up by frost and never repaired, for the Town Council did not pay much attention to this part of town. A few scraggy structures had once been stores but had been deserted when some of the town prospered and moved south away from the tracks.”
