A Kind of Fiction

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

P.K. Page is not only a Governor General Award-winning poet, but also a
fine prose stylist and storyteller. A Kind of Fiction is a selection of
stories written over the last 50 years and collected here for the first
time.

The tales represent a wide variety of styles and themes. There are
fairy tales and fables along with deeply moving stories of old age and
sexual love. In the title story, a young woman named Veronika observes
an elderly woman fall; her sense that the old woman is fiercely
independent checks her inclination to help her up. She sees the old
woman again after an afternoon concert. A fiction writer, Veronika
continues to imagine the old woman’s life. In the end, she realizes
that she has been seeing herself. This fantasy plumbs deep psychological
depths and reads like a thriller.

In “Miracles,” a short tale set in an unnamed foreign land, a
Western woman walks with her local friend to visit friends. Casual
encounters on the street touch on the tragic prevalence of consumption
and other diseases and the deep religious faith of the local people. The
narrator’s helpless anger at her friend’s acceptance of death is
beautifully evoked.

The 18 stories in the collection range widely in setting, theme, and
technique, but all are intriguing, moving, and well crafted. A fine
book.