Release of earlier Kathy Page works provokes, satisfies

By Elizabeth Nolan - Gulf Islands Driftwood - June 25, 2008

Launch event

held last week at Lions Hall

Readers of Kathy Page’s fiction often wonder “Why isn’t there more?” Fans of the clean, crisp style that incised so deeply into the lead characters of The Story of My Face and Alphabet will therefore be excited that new books by the author will soon be available.

The Governor General’s Award-nominated Salt Spring author is currently in the process of writing a new novel, but while we wait, access to two earlier books published in the U.K. will be made available for the first time in this country through a new program with the Writers’ Union of Canada. Page was the first author to be recognized by the program, which is bringing out-of-print books by established writers back into publication with Phoenix Books.

The earlier of the two works Page chose to have reprinted is a collection of short stories, As in Music. First published in 1990, the collection is an interesting glimpse into the author’s emerging style. Several of the stories would make good fodder for literary students employing Freud’s theory of the uncanny — that which is both unknown yet eerily familiar.

Page’s view of humanity appears rather bleak in many cases here, especially in the stories that have an element of fantasy. An interesting example is The Ancient Siddanese, which examines an imaginary desert community through the eyes of future visitors: the meaning of the place and its objects changes according to the needs of the contemporary interpreters.

The Kissing Disease explores a lighter side of human nature, imagining a virus transmitted by kissing that dissolves people’s identities. People can have sex all they want, but the hunger people feel to just kiss again is humourous and touching. Of Romance looks back at a woman’s first sexual experiences, in which she shocks her parents by being neither forced nor in love. A brilliant final line sums up her grown up situation.

One story in the collection stood out for me as both saying something important about the human condition and having characters I wanted to know more about. The Silver Man follows a young single mother and her son, whose genetic defects will never give him the capacity for language. Liz is pulled out of living in an abandoned railway carriage and into council housing because of her pregnancy; after Jim’s birth all she wants to do is escape the prying eyes of bureaucracy and her neighbours.

Liz never wanted a baby in the first place, so she doesn’t mind not having a “proper one.” She also won’t have to worry about his education or career, part of the silver lining that makes her rename him Silver Boy or Silly for short. Despite her evident issues and the episode that makes her imagine Jim as a grown and threatening Silver Man, you want and hope them to do all right together.

I was happy to realize, therefore, that Page’s republished novel is actually an elaboration of this story. Frankie Styne and the Silver Man takes the original characters and adds another neighbour, the eponymous Styne. He’s ugly inside and out, an author who reworks the pain of a disfiguring birth mark by writing pulp novels featuring brutal murders. His fans often note with happiness how sick some sections make them.

Going into Frank’s past as well as Liz’s, Page brings significant depth and motivation to the characters from the very first chapter. Themes include gender roles; parent and child relationships; the frustration of our inability to communicate effectively and the role of language in that problem; the responsibility of the artist and the role of popular culture in society — all these and more are wrapped up in diverse characters who can’t seem to function as society commands.

While Frank seems bent on replicating the violence he imagines in his books, Liz balances being a mother with her grandmother’s command to “avoid the ties that bind” at all cost. Any parent can relate to her panic at feeling she’ll never be free again, never mind in her particular situation. Meanwhile, the neighbours on the other side prove that the most normal seeming are often the most messed up.

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Release of earlier Kathy Page works provokes, satisfies

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