Africa
Laurence is highly respected as a short story writer especially in the way she deals with her so-called “African Stories” as a Canadian looking on an as outsider and she puts that cultural disconnect to especially effective use with her European narrator of “The Drummer of All the World.” His lament could be a motto for much of the stories Laurence wrote about the continent:
“The old Africa was dying, and I felt suddenly rootless, a stranger in the only land I could call home.”
Grandfather Connor
In the collection of interconnected stories titled A Bird in the House, metaphor is used with great skill to delineate the idiosyncratic personality of the narrator’s grandfather. He proves to be quite complex as he shifts within seconds from sound like a rabid conservative suggesting labor unions are nothing but thugs to railing against loan companies as “blood suckers.” The narrator offers a wry metaphorical observation of her own:
“…a look of intense and brooding sorrow came into his face, as he became all at once the champion of the poor and oppressed.”
Opening Lines
In the stories comprising the collection “The Tomorrow-Tamer” Laurence is especially fond of using metaphor in the opening lines. None, however, may be quite so charming and memorable as the dialogue which commences the story of the collection’s two most unlikely heroes, “The Perfume Sea,”
“No question of it,” Mr. Archipelago said, delicately snipping a wisp of hair. “I am flotsam.”
Grandma Connor
A family discussion about the heritage of the narrator becomes flood of names and metaphorical descriptions to identify them. Much more memorable than Uncle Dan being “as phoney as a three dollar bill” is the narrator’s mother’s recollection of Grandma Connor:
“she was a tiny little woman with a face like a falcon, as I recall, kind of fiercely handsome.”
Tetteh and Hardacre
“The Pure Diamond Man” is a complex one overlaid with themes related to colonial Africa, fake African rituals to dupe the white man and diamond minding. Men from two cultures are trying to best the other without the other knowing the full skinny. The two men are most memorably linked together through a metaphorical image:
“Tetteh regarded Hardacre thoughtfully and with a new interest. It seemed to him that the white man’s linen suit was covered with miniature lights, and the lights were diamonds, and the diamonds pierced at Tetteh’s eyes and shone in a blaze of stars.”
