Inspecting the Vaults

Michael Laing is a policy analyst with the Ontario Ministry of
Education.

Eric McCormack teaches English at St. Jerome’s College, Waterloo, Ontario. Inspecting the Vaults is his first book, although 13 of its 20 stories have been published before in academic and literary magazines.

The stories are skillful and disturbing. Carefully grounded in a precise and evocative realism, they quickly move to other worlds, other realities. Some are strongly allegorical, like the title story, which gives its name to the entire collection and sets up many of the book’s themes. Here a detention community is described where an “administration” has placed people whose “crimes” have in various ways undermined the vision of reality which the administration wishes to enforce. Other stories play with the relation between dream and reality, like “Captain Joe,” a version of the Rip van Winkle story, or “No Country for Old Men.” And some reinvent the academic romance, like “The Fragment” or the two parts of “A Train on Gardens,” using esoteric learning or distant regions to seduce or frighten — or both.

Characteristic of all the stories is an intense instability — of identity, of ways of knowing, of bases for behaviour, of confidence in the material on social worlds, of simple comfort in the pleasures of reading. Extremes are sought out, as perspectives for judging the ordinary, as a kind of super-realism in their own right, or simply to baffle expected relations between narrator and reader. There are many physical horrors: images of amputation, decapitation, evisceration, and penetration depressingly abound.

McCormack is an impressive and challenging writer, not always pleasant to read, but often invigorating. He puts words well on the page, and controls his actions adroitly. But the stories are challenging only up to a point. The horrors tend to be not so much scary as yucky; at times the mysteries are more clever than truly mysterious. Inescapable is the sense that one is being lined up for profundities.

McCormack writes in the mode of fiction called “magic realism,” as practised for example by South American writers such as Borges, Cortazar, and Marques. One of his stories, in fact, “Fugue, “ seems to be a variation on a Cortazar story, “Continuity of Parks”; others have appeared in academic journals devoted to the genre. McCormack needs no apology for being in this company, and the tinge of callowness I sense in his work will, as he writes more, no doubt disappear.