The Parrot Who Could

Esther Fisher is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and
a former food critic for The Globe & Mail.

This collection of Robin Skelton’s short stories might appropriately be termed tales from the twilight zone, with fun substituted for terror in the realm of the unexplainable. With one exception, all stories are narrated in the first person in a conversational, chatty tone that reveals the author’s wry and impish sense of humour.

The characters of The Parrot Who Could include the wise-guy, the snob, the incompetent fumbler, the academic, the artsy-craftsy types, and, among others, bureaucrats whose conversation is all gobbledy-gook and double-talk — a panorama which in many ways includes all of us.

Often they’re satirized; at other times, the joke is on the narrator. For example, in “A Matter of Taste,” he and his cronies make fun of a woman who unabashedly admits she knows nothing about art, but who, we learn at the end, launches an artist on a successful career. As with “A Matter of Taste,” many stories have surprise, ironic endings. Others deal with the power of suggestion and with the difficulty of drawing the line between reality and illusion. Others remain unexplainable, sometimes to the point where they are downright silly — like the tale of the man who draws a crowd every time he removes his hat and glasses.

Most enjoyable are the stories about con artists — the female academic who cons her colleagues and acquaintances into furthering her career; the smalltown entrepreneur who promotes a yo-yo contest, ostensibly to promote civic interest; or the girl who gets rid of a boring, patronizing date with a fabricated story of deja-vu.

The Parrot Who Could is uneven. Some tales are excellent, some never get off the ground, and some are dull, but even these are redeemed somewhat by the reader’s awareness of the author chuckling in the background. Skelton seems to have had a good time writing these stories — and by and large, the reader has a good time reading them.