шш in review DISCOURSE OF THE OTHER - University of British ...

BOOKS IN REVIEWbook to pin down. Its two endings point,on the one hand, to a "roadless world";on the other, to the statement: "therewill be no end to this road." There iseither an endless road or no road at all.Similarly, Arachne appropriates her freedomin the personal gesture of sheddingher underwear (underwear in this novelis a metaphor for the repression ofwomen) while at the same time underminingthis gesture in her public professionas underwear salesperson, thus perpetuatingthe system she attempts toundo. Contradictions like these add depthto the text but they also boggle any decisiveinterpretation. In the end thestructure strains and, despite the entertainingand engaging style, the image ofwomen presented between the lines is tooclose to the pathetic copper figures forcomfort: relentless and comically sad.In contrast to the baffling movement ofArachne, the characters in Mary Burns'scollection of short stories Suburbs of theArctic Circle are very much rooted inplace, and their sense of self comes fromthis sense of place. There is an oppositionset up between the people in the smallnorthern town where these stories are forthe most part situated and those who areon the "Outside." This dichotomy alonecreates an understanding of self (in reactionto what it is not) that is muchmore firmly grounded than anything wesee in No Fixed Address.Burns provides a sensitive portrayal ofthat compelling small-town curiosity becauseshe couples it with the equally insistentdesire not to know, the desire notto tell a story. In the title story the cluesto a crime are slowly unravelled in anattempt to piece together the truth. Butas the story progresses it becomes clearthat in fact no one really wants to hearwhat happened. This same idea is repeatedagain and again, most notably in"The Men on My Window." Knowingthe story signals an involvement, andconsequently a responsibility, that manycharacters wish to avoid. The desire notto tell the story is approached from adifferent angle in "Collected Bear Stories."Here telling the story causes theintensity of the actual event — confrontationwith a bear — to fade. The narrator,"afraid to lose it [the reality of theexperience] all together [я'с]," stops tellingthe story.Burns, however, does keep telling thestory and she does so surprisingly wellgiven the limitations of her always simpleand unpretentious style. The movementof the first story, which traces theslow collapsing inward of one small town,parallels the structure of the collection asa whole: each story moves closer to avery concrete centre, the arctic circle,that is reached in the final story. Theattempted experimentation ("A JointCommunique," for example) is not successfuland the unvaried tone becomes abit tiresome but the insights into isolation,place, and story are worth making.H. R. Percy's The Model Lover fallssomewhere between Van Herk's oppositionto that which fixes (the story andplace) and Burns's opposition to thatwhich distorts (the story). Percy's characterstry to make art work for them, tomake art not only adequate to their experiencebut also to surpass it, to articulatean inarticulate silence, all that "twoshynesses could not say." Given the ambitiousnessof this aim it is not surprisingthat the attempt repeatedly ends in failure.In fact, seven of the eighteen storiesthat are collected here deal explicitlywith art (music, architecture, and sculpture)and in each story the desired "art"object is either flawed, destroyed, or incomplete.In "Afterglow," one of the experimental(and less successful) stories, Percywrites somewhat presumptuously: "Forwhat was being reduced to ashes therewas not merely the erotic dream [a279