In the Chambers of the Sea

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British
Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and author of The Salvation Army and the
Public.

The best books demand not merely to be read but to be savoured. In the
Chambers of the Sea is such a book. The 14 stories it offers—the first
published work by this writer—are exquisite gems, perfectly shaped to
reflect the emotional lives of the characters they portray. Whether
reading about Jessie (the “mad woman from Bell Island,” shunned by
society, who becomes, for the dying narrator, the life-affirming
presence she needs at that moment) or Jimmy Joe from the Cape Shore (who
is “tough as nails” but is ground under by the hard life of orphan
homes, trying to find out what love is), we are absorbed into lives and
relationships with amazing gentleness and veracity. But beyond that,
beyond the experiential pleasure, is the added treat of simply relishing
Rendell’s long, sensuous sentences. Of being surprised by her pointed
ironies. Of being delighted by her unusual similes and metaphors: as we
watch “fluorescent green caterpillars bungee jumping on invisible
lines from chestnut trees” or listen to crows starting “their Sex
Pistols hymn to the morning” or being startled by her image of the
harbour as “small and shaped like a kidney bowl; it is rotten with
untreated sewage, the blood of the mother toxic with the waste of her
delinquent children.” Rendell is indeed, as the cover blurb asserts, a
“distinctive new voice in Canadian fiction”—one well worth
listening to.