REAL CHARACTERS IN A REAL WORLD

 

I first came across the literary works of Abby Geni when her agent (who is also my agent) gave me a copy of The Lightkeepers over a delightful lunch when I was passing through New York. Laura was pretty sure I would like it, first because it is maritime, and secondly because it involves the wildlife of the sea.  She was right.  I loved it.

What I found remarkable, apart from the vivid descriptions of sharks, seals, whales, and seagulls, was the lucidness of the character descriptions.  The chief protagonist, Miranda, is a wildlife photographer who has opted to spend a year on the Farallon Islands, a bleak archipelogo of rocks beset by harsh seas off California. She becomes so familiar that it seems it would be easy to recognize her in the street.

Her fellow scientists, an odd assortment of obsessed and strange people, are equally strongly drawn. Added to that are a compulsive prologue, a murder and a convoluted mystery, plus an awe-inspiring (though hostile) background, which made this book an absolute pageturner.  Obviously, I had to read more of her work.

My next was The Wildlands, which turned out to be equally compelling, but a rather different book. A small family in a small town in Oklahoma has lost everything in a tornado. The four children, Darlene, Jane, Cora, and Tucker, cower in the basement bunker in the storm, and emerge to find they are orphaned and penniless. The farm that sustained the family is devastated, and the body of their father can't even be found. 

Darlene, the oldest at the age of 18, works to support her young siblings. Giving up her dreams of college, she has a parttime job in a local store, but this is not enough for food and shelter. Desperate, she sells the story of the unluckiest family in Oklahoma to whatever news outlet will pay, and accumulates enough to buy a delapidated trailer. And so the dreary fight for existence drags on, while Tucker acts more and more strangely. Without logic, he calls the publicity that Darlene invited improper. Then, after a huge row about it, he vanishes.

A few years later, he arrives at the trailer gravely wounded. A cosmetics factory was blown up in an act of sabotage, and somehow he was involved in it. Nine-year-old Cora is the one who finds him, and helps him treat his wounds. At the same time he coerces her into sharing his obsession for saving animals from the depravity of man.  They abscond together, and travel the country in a series of stolen cars, while he commits more acts of sabotage, including murder, and Darlene is desperately trying to track them down.

Like The Lightkeepers, it is a page-turner.  The story is remarkable, but it is the quality of the writing that shines the most.  The sensational climax could have descended into black humor, but is held tight by the talent of the creator. The ending, too, could have been cozy-cute, but conveys a message, instead. 

A most thought-provoking book, a revelation of the traps that lurk in the deeps of the best-intentioned of obsessions.

Short story collections are hard to review, and this one particularly so.  Each and every story deserves a review of its own. Because of this it is a slow read, as the ending of each essay compels the reader to sit back and think.

There are biology-based stories, which of course appealed to me. "The Rapture of the Deep," the first story, has a background of wildlife research, much like the setting of The Lightkeepers.  In this case, sharks -- and the remarkable courage of a woman who is so in love with her job that she returns to shark tagging after nearly losing her life to a tiger shark. The title story (which is the last) is about an entomologist who studies insects on decaying cadavers. It comes with fascinatingly well researched biological details, but perhaps more importantly, the protagonist is in a longterm, very happy lesbian relationship that is being threatened from without. So naturally there is a murder.

Gender identification and gender roles is a common theme in this collection, and very well handled indeed. In "Across, Beyond, Through," a devoted father is coping with the realisation that his teenaged daughter wishes to be a boy. In "Porcupines in Trees" a woman in a happy lesbian relationship struggles with a profound depression that she cannot understand. In "Mother, Wife, Sister, Daughter" a girl is taxed with the blatant failure of her father to act as a father was expected to behave. 

There is variety, however. In "A Spell for Disappearing" a woman who is being stalked and courted by a plausible money-stealing crook solves her dilemma with witchcraft. In "Love in Florida" there is a man whose first love appeals for him to visit the prison where she is incarcerated. In "The First Rule of Natalie" a young girl is convinced that her autistic sister is a Selkie. And there are others. Probably my favorite -- ""Petrichor" -- is about a woman who loses all six senses in the Covid epidemic.

All are explorations of the depths of human nature, and all are worth reading. You will need to take your time, but will be well rewarded.