Beneath the Western Slopes

C. Stephen Gray is Director of Information Services, Institute of
Chartered Accountants of Ontario.

Patrick Roscoe’s Beneath the Western Slopes is an eerie collection of dreamlike short stories set in a small village on the west coast of Mexico. The stories have a common setting and recurring characters, and one might suspect that what would emerge might be an overall picture of village life in rural Central America. Rural realism, however, is not what Roscoe’s stories attempt to portray.

Instead,the reader is treated to a very unusual series of recurring images — seen from different characters’ perspectives — which add up to a kind of summary of the village’s collective unconscious. The images are haunting and ethereal, dreams of sand, salt water, sparkling gems, fluttering leaves, butterflies, and birds, and the echoes of the dead or dreaming characters who slip past the reader’s eye.

The stories are crafted with deliberate simplicity, and read superficially like oral folktales, myths those primary reality derives from centuries of retelling. Yet the time is the present, and the characters must cope with a variety of tropical ennui, which imbues them with a certain aboriginal existential quality most readers will not have encountered before.

Roscoe’s poetic stories are definitely not for everyone, but reading through them on a cold Canadian winter’s evening offers a thoroughly pleasant alternative to television ads for a southern vacation.