Illusion of boundaries

Press, 18 May 1985, Page 20

Illusion of boundaries

Real Illusions. By Russell Haley.. Victoria University Press, 1985. 124 pp. $9.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Owen Marshall) The oxymoron of this title is more than teasing word play and an arresting caption: it is a significant indication of Russell Haley’s theme that “there is no consistent edge or boundary to the real.” Haley quotes in application to himself lines from Salman Rushdie, “As for me: I too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries and try to impose on them the ones that exist.” Certainly Haley’s stories show clearly a migrant’s preoccupation with dwelling places be they houses or countries; a migrant’s sense of being on the outside looking in; a migrant’s lust for things of personal continuity; a migrant’s awareness of alternative landscapes and alternative lives. In a sense though, as Haley must be aware, he became a migrant when he became a writer, as surely as he became one when he left Yorkshire. V.S. Pritchett in his autobiography shrewdly saw in retrospect the effect of such a decision: “I became a foreigner. For myself that is what a writer is — a man living on the other side of a frontier.” A dislocation of place may add energy and unease to stories such as “Looping the Loop,” “Fog,” and “The Polish Village,” but even more significant in the purpose and success bf such stories is the dislocation of time. Free time, and the migrant has escaped from loss and isolation. The longer we live the more of our life is behind us, and the more it presses upon the present; invading it when enabled by a phrase, a fragrance, a building, or a photograph, the name of a disease or the cadence of laughter. “Ghosts are feedback along the optic and aural nerves. Whatever you contain can get back out. So I have seen mother, walking naked at seventy, in my own house; clung to a fading connection with Don on the pillion seat of his Matchless. Don, my older and younger brother. I was sixteen when he sailed through the air and flew away. Forty-eight when I talk to my elder brother of twenty-two.” (Looping the Loop). In “Occam’s Electric Razor” Holliday is confronted by his father, cremated Jong before, sitting in the chair, and realises that once time is let loose everything is flux. “What time was it? the clock had stopped. The fingers of its hands were spread right over its face.” Several of Haley’s stories mention the leminiscate, the recumbent figure of eight, the symbol of infinity; the device to remind us that there is “no boundary to the real.” Demarcation of time into past, present, and future is as artificial and conventional in life as it is in art: a selection of the past is an aspect of our present experience and a sure element of our future. “I tried to invent a metric clock. But bits of time circled back and were specially significant.” (Looping the Loop). “I am ten. I am forty-eight. Keen eyed and long sighted. There is ample food for another thirty years. Nothing perishes.” (Real Illusions). '

Work such as Haley’s is not obvious, and not interesting on a level of narrative action; therefore it can only succeed when the author has a maturity of language to match the maturity of themes. Haley has the necessary language skills, and sustains them throughout the majority of these stories. His imagery has remarkable energy and originality. “Rose could tell it but it would soon be over, as flurried and sharp as a cock treading a hen, before she’d hardly begun.” Many instances seem to grow past normal imagery of comparison into personal symbolism. “The sea is an immense train which rushes through the vaults of our ears all night: a series of muffled explosions: a woman swimming, weeping, and not arriving at her destination: the murdered leader wailing — in search of his hollow skull: my grandfather, Emmanuel, trying to drag the slaughtered horse from the surf: a choir of seals.” (“Except that They Move and Talk.”) There are weaknesses. Dialogue is generally overshadowed by stronger aspects of Haley’s style; a story such as “Dogmaster’’ seems an imitation of Kafka; the cryptic is overdone, and solipsism remains a weakness despite Haley’s explanation. But Haley is a strong, vivid, yet thoughtful writer, and his “Real Illusions” is a welcome collection. Above all perhaps he reminds us that in literature as in art, the true likeness is not captured by a copy.