The Garden of Eloise Loon

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Magic Off Main:
The Art of Esther Warkov.

This second collection of short stories by Saskatchewan writer, Edna Alford, is the work of an extraordinary, black-poetic and original imagination. In these fourteen finely crafted stories, Alford demonstrates the gift of “long distance” vision she assigns to the narrator of the short fictional fragment, “Head,” which introduces the volume. As a child of the Canadian prairie, the voice of “Head” has learned from the experience of the prairie landscape to read the shadows of reality and to “flesh it out” in a way no city dweller can; he sees, as well, with a wry gothic clarity, that life is also the process of decomposition and, as the alter ego of the artist, that artist must struggle to see this through, no matter how melancholy the experience:

And when I come to the stone pile down by the slough, I see the birds have picked my whole head clean as a whistle, like one of those buffalo skulls you see in the museums. And in the holes that used to be the eyes, I see somebody took a couple of little stones from the pile and stuck them in. They’d hung a pair of spectacles with wire frames on it. Only there was no glass in them, no glass at all. Nothing a fellow could see through even if he did have eyes.

Edna Alford’s unique vision occasions something of a supra-real or hallucinatory quality in many of these narratives, which are built around the fragmented psyche of modern man-woman and such concomitant contemporary themes as mental breakdown, the tension between rural and urban life, and the nuclear countdown. However, there is nothing of the polemic here — these are private tales of individual anguish and epiphanies of second sight both for the characters and the readers.

In “In Case of Rapture,” for example, a local boy comes back to the prairies as a doctor, an alcoholic, driven to attempt to make sense of modern life through arranging jack-fish bones. In “The Metal Detector,” Aunt Connie, when Uncle Ace dies, comes back to Trestle, Saskatchewan from Vancouver, with a metal detector, to treasure-hunt for her mother’s viking warrior brooch, lost long ago on her parent’s homestead.

Hallucination, nightmare, dream can also give way to seemingly sensational grotesquerie in Alford’s fictional world, as it does in a story such as “Five to a Hand.” Here, the odyssey of the protagonist is to remove the fingers of his friend from a home freezer, in order to bury them properly with the corpse.

Alford, then, is a superb fictionalizer in this collection of haunting, resonant stories which are layered with meaning and easily of the same calibre that won hen the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for her first collection, A Sleep Full of Dreams (1982).