Marine Life

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Svendsen’s impressive publishing credits bear excellent witness to the
fine quality of her eight stories in Marine Life. These chronicles of a
dysfunctional (normal!) Vancouver family begin in the 1950s and continue
to the present, with the narrator, the youngest girl, delivering her
impressions of her eccentric relations: her mother (three times
married), her problematical older brother, and her two polar-opposite
sisters.

The pleasant lunacies and the potential destructiveness of love
dominate these characters as they wander in and out of the family
circle. The word “grotesque” comes to mind, from the tradition of
Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor but in the more recent sense of
Barbara Gowdy and Margaret Atwood. Tragicomic elements shift naturally
as the author surrounds her shrugging characters with a graphic and
accurate social portrait of the times. Her dialogue—witty, sensible,
and always true—engages the attention as it enlarges her characters.

When necessary, Svendsen can employ a poetic touch to enhance the
moment, to change innocence into awareness: “I see my mother crossing
the pool, going away from me; her breathing is erratic and rapid. The
paddleboard supports her chest, but only her legs lend motion, as her
arms reach out awkwardly. I’m nervous now: I realize we are all in the
same water. I sense my baby drifting inside, and look at my mother,
flailing toward the other side, and I am in between, some kind of
lifeguard in the shallows.”

The effect is one of disjointedness, perhaps, when the locale shifts
later from Vancouver to Florida, New York, and Igloolik, and the final
pronouncement about marriage (like the major theme) seems forced and
false, but these are small points of contention about a very enjoyable
book.