The ten stories in Errantry range in length from sixty pages to three pages, with most falling somewhere in the middle, and, as the subtitle puts it, they’re all “strange.” Often, the strangeness is something unexplained or not fully resolved: a man goes to Cornwall in part to repeat a trip his now-dead wife took when she was a teenager, goes inside a fogou (an underground stone structure), and has an odd experience that parallels one recounted to him by one of his wife’s friends who was on the Cornwall trip with her. Or a fantastical creature is living in a park in London. Or a woman explores a strange city and finds a dead bird that isn’t quite a bird. Sometimes the strangeness is more explicit: there’s a werewolf story, and a story that plays with Finnish myth/the Finnish land of the dead.
That story with the Finnish land of the dead, “The Far Shore,” is totally my favorite: a middle-aged former dancer whose career was cut short due to injury, and who’s just lost his teaching job, arranges to stay in the off-season at a camp in Maine owned by his oldest friend. Part of the appeal is the setting and mood, the descriptions of the winter landscape, an early storm and the wind and darkness, in passages like this:
No lights shone beyond the windows of his room. The reflection from the bedside lamp seemed insubstantial as a candle flame; the darkness outside a solid mass, huge and inescapable, that pressed against the panes. His room sat beneath the eaves, where the wind didn’t roar but crooned, a sound like mourning doves. (141)
But “The Far Shore” also appeals because it’s got elements of a love story and of myth and of fairy tale: it’s about the strangeness at the edges of our world, but it’s also about transformation: the appeal of a crossing-over that doesn’t come with a crossing-back. I love this:
Life did not work like this, love did not work like this. Philip knew that. Only stories did, where wonder trumped despair and desire overcame death. The fairy’s kiss, the sacrificial faun; enchanted swans and shoes that sliced like blades, like ice. That was why he had become a dancer, not just to dream of fellowship and flight, but to partake, however fleetingly, in something close to ecstasy—and how long since he had experienced that? (150)
In other stories, I was less interested in the characters or plot or even the strangeness, sometimes, but did appreciate Hand’s lush descriptions: one story includes a trip to the Carolinas and describes getting out of the car at a rest stop after driving south, the transformation of the landscape into a place of honeysuckle and kudzu and the sound of frogs and insects, a world away from the story’s start in DC; another has some vivid descriptions of central London in the snow; the story about Cornwall has this gorgeous bit about the view from the train window on the trip from Plymouth to Penzance:
He’d bought a novel in London at Waterstones, but instead of reading gazed out at a landscape that was a dream of books he’d read as a child—granite farmhouses, woolly-coated ponies in stone paddocks, fields improbably green against lowering grey sky, graphite clouds broken by blades of golden sun, a rainbow that pierced a thunderhead then faded as though erased by some unseen hand. Ringnecked pheasants, a running fox. More fields planted with something that shone a starting goldfinch-yellow. A silvery coastline hemmed by arches of russet stone. Children wrestling in the middle of an empty road. A woman walking with head bowed against the wind, hands extended before her like a diviner. (82)
I’m pleased to have read this, though I wish it had been proofread/copy-edited better: typos that made me wince included “soundlesss” for “soundless,” “ever” for “every,” “majety” for “majesty,” “wanings” for “warnings,” and more that I didn’t bother to note down.
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