Peter Chiykowski Archives

A Flame, a Burst of Light

By Douglas Glover

Of the reasons for our lengthy and fatal sojourn in the swamps of Sandusky, there are several theories. 1) The Americans wished to exact vengeance for atrocities committed by Capt. Crawford’s Indios on the Raisin River. 2) The Americans wished to prevent the men from rejoining their regiments before the close of the summer campaigns. 3) To supply the want of souls in the afterlife.

We were seven hundred dreamers starving and shivering to death in this gateway to the City of Dis.

Of the reasons for our deaths, there are no theories. Ague, fever (quartan, intermittent and acute) and the bloody flux carried us away. Old wounds, opened from damp and lack of common nutriment; pneumonia, dropsy, pthithis, galloping consumption, gangrene and suicide account for the rest. An alarming number of walking corpses attended the fallen like Swiss automatons in a magic show, then tottered off to expire face down in the bulrushes.

In the swamps of Sandusky, there were more corpses than souls. We had a surfeit of bodies. They were difficult to bury in the washing ooze.

Kingsland and Thompson, wraiths and daredevils, murderous on the day with Springfields we borrowed from the Americans at Detroit, mounted amateur theatricals though much bothered at delivering their lines on a stage of sucking mud. Sgt. Collins, of Limerick and the 41st, took the female roles, warbling a sweet falsetto. I mind he scalped Kentuckians with his razor at the Battle of the Raisin, along with Tsenkwatawa’s unspeakable Shawnee.

At Long Point in October, when we land, whaleboats and cutters rowed ashore by negro slaves with superior airs, a barefoot girl in a wedding dress skips down the cliff path after regimental medical wagons and surgeons on horseback. Over night, mist froze on the sails and sheets and shattered down on us like broken glass. We skate on the slick decks as the ships slide by the dunes and ponds along the point, mysterious and blood red from rotting sedge and fallen leaves.

The cliffs are dun-coloured clay banks undermined by the fall storms with great half-dead pines like ships’ masts toppling down and thin cows and hobbled multi-coloured horses grazing on narrow zig-zag paths, low roofs and chimney smoke from a cluster of mean log and slab board houses above. We watch the girl, brown as a monkey, with ankles flashing beneath her dress, eyes wide at the sight of us. Preceding her, the medical wagons are like mastless ships with their iron kettles, great stirring spoons, and boxes of spirits and medicaments clanking listlessly. Clouds of geese and ducks, their wings flashing, lift and swirl over the point and settle again behind us.

I think of rhumb lines and wind roses and portolan charts. I imagine a map that indicates the vast populations of the dead, the departed souls like smoke spiraling up from the cemeteries, cities of corpses, suburbs of despair. The bodies of the newly dead make mournful humps of the sailcloth shroud spread over the deck. The boats roll and creak dolefully in the cold rain.

Read the rest of the story in The New Quarterly, Number 118. See also, in the same issue, “On Writing ‘A Flame, a Burst of Light'” by dg and a short story “Shine” by NC book reviewer and aphorist Peter Chiykowski.

Anonymous folk engraving of merpeople.

Speculating on Divinity Genes

A Review of Matthew J. Trafford’s The Divinity Gene

By Peter Chiykowski

The Divinity Gene
Matthew J. Trafford
Douglas & McIntyre
ISBN 9781553656036

In his debut collection of short stories, The Divinity Gene, Matthew J. Trafford pulls off a generic balancing act, suspending his swaying narrative tightrope between the often opposed platforms of “genre” and “literary” fiction. His performance is certainly captivating. Walking the line with him are rogue angels, dissected mermaids, messianic clones, Faustian e-demons, and homophobic undead (the term “zombie” is considered demeaning to still-sentient beings who have yet to gain the vote). These creatures swing the stories between scenes that are sometimes fantastically unfamiliar, sometimes unflinchingly intimate, often both.

“Thoracic Exam,” the opening act of the ten-story collection, is a good indicator of the volume’s strengths and weakness. An unnamed female narrator-nurse examines the recent widow of an old love interest. The routine check-up turns into an opportunity for the romantically unsatisfied stethoscope-wielder to investigate the body and the life she never chose. The story showcases Trafford’s writing chops (“I must eavesdrop inside of her”), but also his off-putting love of jargon (“Her lacrimal ducts are now secreting full tears”).

Public Domain Image from Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.

His tendency toward clinical and obscure terms, one that recurs frequently, culminates in a prepubescent narrator from a fishing village describing a cut-up mermaid using words like “striated,” “lepidopterist,” and “filigreed.” The narrator’s vocabulary asks for more suspended disbelief than the mythical sea creature around which the story revolves.

Trafford skilfully deploys the speculative elements of his fiction. Never does he let fantasy outweigh the emotional core of his plots, and crucially, he never lets the magic or technology interfere with the complex networks of desire that motivate his characters. Rather, the “genre” elements of his stories work to distil the conflicts and intensify the choices the characters have to make. In “iFaust,” a widowed grandfather wrestles with the decision to trade his well-aged soul to the devil in exchange for that of his ungrateful grandson who made a literal Faustian bargain for success as a rock musician. The conflict – the grandson’s sullen plea and the grandfather’s vacillating refusal – is served well by the supernaturally high stakes. Unfortunately, the tension is later spoiled by a last-minute decision from a secondary character who consequently trivializes the grandfather’s role in the story.

This is not to say that Trafford relies on speculation and magic to distract from narrative shortcomings. One of the collection’s most powerful pieces, “Past Perfect,” is a slice-of-life story that follows the experiences of a young man losing his older husband to aphasia. It is one of the book’s many grief narratives, arguably the most powerful. While in “The Renegade Angels of Parkdale,” the gay male narrator of a similar age is made passive by the loss of his partner, relying on friends and fallen angels to initiate the story’s significant scenes, the narrator of “Past Perfect” is admirably active in dealing with and dramatizing the gradual and thoroughly disenchanting processes of grief. The loss of partners and family members is a recurrent focus of the work, as is the nature of homosexual and homosocial relationships.

In addition to being fascinated by the classic themes of death and love, Trafford is also interested in formal experimentation. “Renegade Angels” features some two-column simultaneous narration. The gambit is a little distracting, a visual reminder that the reader is involved in the physical task of reading a page and not the cognitive task of a reading a story. The footnotes of “The Grimpils” feel less like aids for differentiating protagonists and more like excuses for the author to trot out his technique. The centre-stage action of the characters coping with the disappearance of their friends and lovers is vastly more interesting than Nick’s aromatic analysis of Ceylon tea. The opening section of the title story, “The Divinity Gene,” engages in a much more rewarding bit of play. It is formatted like a wiki entry, complete with links and section headings to explain technological advances that lead to the genetic cloning of Jesus in 2006.

Ultimately, The Divinity Gene indulges in a level of showmanship that is unnecessary, but not unappreciated. The volume is best taken in multiple sittings. The young introspective gay narrators dealing with isolation and/or grief can become a bit monotonous, even when separated by the various other protagonists (including a widowed grandfather, a thirteen year-old boy, and a bitter middle-aged nurses). Whatever their limitations, though, his stories all come from a uniquely powerful breed of conflict, one playfully mutted up with formal and fantastical experiments that continue to yap and growl in the memory after the book is closed.

Peter Chiykowski