Inland Passage and Other Stories

Janet MacArthur was a freelance writer in Calgary.

The 21 short stories in Jane Rule’s Inland Passage clearly demonstrate the author’s versatility in presenting a diversity of human experiences. Whether she is dealing with commonplace domestic scenarios or homosexual relationships, she never fails to offer an accurate rendering of life’s anxieties, emotional ambiguities, and rewards. Her warmth and essential humanity are conveyed in a simple prose style that nevertheless provides us with a complex examination of North American life. Rule’s emphasis, as always, is on the involvement of human beings with each other, on how individual characters create or fail to create a definition of themselves in the context of others.

Dulce, the middle-aged English professor and title character of the first story, recapitulates without bitterness or apology a series of bad affairs that make up her emotional history. The story is a compassionate account of how one whose predilection is for art rather than life withdraws from other people. Other characters are less tentative and more involved. In the “Harry and Anna” stories, the only grouping in this collection, Rule probes beneath an apparently unremarkable domestic surface to examine how an “average Canadian family” works out its own solutions to the problems posed by vacations, grandparents, pets, and the temptations of the modern world. Harry is a conscientious, devoted family man whose sensitivity is often a source of anxiety for himself, of occasional exasperation for his realistic, intelligent wife, and of confusion for his children. These stories provide a delightful, often comic, portrayal of a family coping with a variety of situations, conventional or otherwise.

In “Inland Passage,” Fidelity and Troy share a less conventional desire, a cabin on a voyage to Prince Rupert, and the last stages of grief, circumstances that eventually erode their mutual defensiveness. This story and others successfully use homosexuality as a context for the exploration of the complexities of loneliness, death, friendship, and marriage. A generational conflict over the love between Tess and Annie comes to a surprising resolution in “The Real World,” while the illusion of freedom that marriage allows Gillian, who enjoys lesbian affairs on the side, is the subject of “His Nor Hers,” an interesting examination of why unhappy marriages often withstand the vicissitudes of time.

Rule is an adept when it comes to the investigation of human relationships of any kind. This book covers a broad spectrum of sexual and emotional dilemmas: wives dealing with infidelity, women on their own for the first time, elderly people struggling to survive independently, old friends trying to come to terms with cancer, and non-conformists of many persuasions all provide her with the material out of which she creates her compelling work.