The Blue House

Carolyn Hlus was a lecturer in English literature at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Lesley McAllister’s The Blue House has a form which is quasi-prose, quasi-poetry, quasi-travelogue. I am at a loss to define it. Perhaps it is best described as a post-modern collage of prose and poetical fragments interspersed with quotations from a travel book, Mexico City, and from a sociological study, Old Age.

Superficially, the book is composed of blunt statements about three characters. Mary is presumably a young woman, Jack “is 75” and Tom is Mary’s contemporary. Apparently the three latched onto one another in Mexico and travelled around that country in Tom’s orange Volkswagen. The omniscient persona recalls their one-month Mexican experience, “surrounded by beaches and Mayan ruins.”

On a deeper level, The Blue House reveals Mary’s confusions about gender, aging, and life in general. Her adventures in Mexico — the sights of the old and new civilizations, the beaches, the children, Tom’s vague philosophies: “I travel to recover a whole / undamaged world upon which time has no hold” — are Mary’s stepping stones on the road to self-understanding and worldly enlightenment.

The Blue House is an interesting text: its exotic Mexican images suggest mystery and intrigue and give the book a value not so much for what it says as for what it implies.