This review contains mild spoilers for the stories Amethyst, Heroes, A Thread of Truth, and Marielena in this collection.
Short story collections serve many purposes. They are catalogues of an author’s smaller opuses, or a snapshot of one era in their careers. The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories is a map, one in which the author as cartographer charts a journey that the reader is invited to follow. The stories, edited into one volume, are active participants in a larger tale exploring the author’s craft, and are “evaluating their relationship to a world that has changed since they were created”, as she says in her introduction. The introduction is, in and of itself, a highlight of the collection, replete with erudite and imagery-rich ruminations on the skill and imaginative power that drives and is driven by short fiction, in particular speculative fiction. Her commentary on the place of short stories in the careers of debut writers entering the market is set to strike a chord in every creative heart that has sought to have its words heard by others.
The stories themselves occupy a liminal space between the speculative and the grounded, decidedly literary palates. This does not always work in their favour, which is highlighted in their organisation. The speculative nature of the stories dips by the second piece, Heroes, and loses steam until the fourth story, Flying in the Face of God. Short stories are to be consumed as shots rather than banquets (at least in my philosophy), with the ideal collection building on itself as each tales progresses, driving home the theme of the volume by its end. On the other hand, perhaps it is this exact fact that embodies the running current of liminality that underscores each tale, and, as Allan puts it in the opening story Amethyst, helps them straddle “the gulf between the possible and the permitted”.
Amethyst opens the reader to themes of blurred realities. As the character Angela’s obsession with UFO phenomena generates allusions to a connection with alien entities inaccessible to the narrator, the narrator herself is drawn into a strange space, oscillating around an aged town full of things that simultaneously do and don’t happen. Are there family troubles or even abuse in Angela’s home – or are there not? Was there in a crack in a ground in the warehouse where Angela had a seemingly cosmic encounter – and if so, why was it not there when the narrator returned again later on? The narrative cuts off at a moment that effectively hones in on this uncertainty, this uncanniness, this unexplained merging of spaces that are entangled, not to be separated or reasoned into a logical series of events. It is an effective and engaging opening, though hindered by a tendency for the narrator’s train of thought to switch tracks with no apparent narrative outcome, that ends up disorienting the reader.
The semi-epistolary story Heroes reinforces the notion of blurred realities, even though the speculative elements are somewhat lacking. The setting of Raisin Terrace exists on a boundary, teetering on the edge of either continued endurance or redevelopment, neither here nor there. “‘It’s like a no-mans land,’” one of the characters is quoted as saying in an in-universe newspaper clipping. “‘If you close your eyes, you can almost hear the guns.’” Adding onto this, the chronology – which appears to the reader like smudged charcoal, imprecise yet defined – makes palpable the transitory sense of the place. Other highlights of Allan’s use of space appear in the notion of nexuses as in The Science of Chance. That said, the execution of this feature is not always up to the task. The description of the character Marten’s house in Heroes is a remarkably dry portrait of a verbal still life, full of odds and ends that ought to demonstrate a great deal about character and theme, but in the end feel closer to reportage than revelation. This is a recurring feature in all of Allan’s stories, with a reliance on stark description that often feels disconnected from the narrator’s own ruminations.
Where spaces meet people, Allan expands on the uncanny with notions of incursions, a feature that occurs in the majority of the stories and creates an inbuilt sense of the half-unknown, and sometimes, the entirely foreign. A highlight of this and of the collection is Marielena, recounting the story of a refugee, his demon(s), and a time traveller. While this is not the only tale to speak of time travellers, the way the temporal displacement was juxtaposed with the spatial displacement of the refugee elevated the tale. The trauma of leaving behind one’s present – one’s time and one’s place – for somewhere unknown in the hopes that better deeds can come of leaving, only to slip down into a seemingly inescapable limbo, is made doubly poignant by combining two human stories – one in the realm of the fantastic, and one brutally true to life. It combines this with a critique of the mundane, of the structures and bureaucracy and inanity of such a purgatory. As the narrator says, “You are no-one here until you can back up your personal tragedy with the appropriate paperwork”. The open ending is agonising, but perhaps apt. We depart the narrator on the brink of a decision that is out of his control – and it is this lack of control that is, in its truest sense, the embodiment of writing in the realm of the speculative.
A highlight for me was Allan’s recurrent use of hidden histories and myth, which is most effectively broadcast in A Thread of Truth. The story is deeply atmospheric, with the descriptions of the settings a departure from many of the other more straight-laced descriptions of spaces, and the stories of the protagonists intertwined with and nestled into stories and myths of lives hurt and lives changed. The protagonist’s arachnophobia is beautiful describe and unpacked. The resonant description of fear, its heat and chilliness, its prickling and its headiness, resonates. When the protagonist loses the drive for his studies, it illuminates the way fear is paralysing, the way it freezes a person, makes one want to feel, the way it occupies conscious and unconscious thought alike. Fight or flight is not constrained to a moment – it is ongoing, and when fear is ongoing, a low burning current of stress, that is where trauma grows. This is beautifully tethered to the notion of intergenerational trauma – wholly real or embellished, which is up to the reader’s own interpretation. Age and history underpin many stories in this collection, and it feeds into both the sense of transitory space and the sense of displacement that are so key to the collection. “‘There is something stealthy in their movement,’” an arachnologist is quoted as saying within the story, while describing spiders, “‘in their seeming ability to render themselves invisible…an element of the mythological that tends towards the horrific.’” When combined with the reference to M.R. James – which instantly drew up imagery of his short story The Ash Tree – the broader sense of story-as-history pervades A Thread of Truth.
Allan, in her introduction, points to the primacy that craft takes in the realm of writing short stories, and so a comment must be made on the fact that very few stories, despite having engaging thematic focuses, actually give their characters a powerful sense of voice. Allan as the author has a very clear voice – her style unifies the stories. However, none of the character voices shine, with the exception of Marielena, which has a passionately written and exceptionally strong narrative voice. Most of the protagonists, however, tend to feel like vectors, vehicles for rumination rather than fully formed characters in and of themselves. There is, naturally, a limitation in the form, but the lack of voice was an insurmountable barrier for me and lessened y enjoyment of the collection as a whole.
Ultimately, The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories is a collection that effectively meditates on themes of liminal space, transition, displacement, history, and the truths and untruths that are obliged to underpin all of these things. However, it is ultimately hindered by a lack of engaging narrative voices and an ineffective match between descriptions of settings and the thematic role said settings occupy.
★★★
Thank you Titan Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!