Short Stories
A breathtaking way with words
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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Margo Lanagan is a words-person who has laboured long and persistently at the craft of languaging stories.
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Black Juice; Margo Lanagan , Viva Books Pvt. Ltd , Rs.160.
ONLY rarely does the writing inside books actually warrant the fulsome praise lavished on it by blurb and shout lines; as far as Margo Lanagan's Black Juice is concerned, "breathtaking", "dazzling", "wonderful" "exceptional" don't exaggerate.
Lanagan's way with words is breathtaking; she spells them into magic, she cajoles them into chores, she commands them into soldiery, she sings them, she speaks them, she dances them, and they in turn cast an unfaltering spell over the reader. It is impossible not to recognise Margo Lanagan as a words-person who has laboured long, intent and persistently at the craft of languaging stories.
Complex and nuanced
The 10 stories in Black Juice range over an expanse of human imagining so vast but so complex, nuanced and well stirred that they cannot be frozen into genre or type. It's like living, you walk several landscapes at the same time: this worldly and otherworldly.
So in Black Juice we see places and situations in which people are real-like and fantastical at the same time, these are people like you and I: Ikky, being punished for murder, and her family of mother and siblings; Dot, the musician and his mother and sister; Pa and Nan and their grandson. Except that Ikky's punishment for axing her husband in a fit of anger is to be made to sink slowly into a tar pit, bit by bit, while her siblings `sing her down', watched by crowds, watched over by her family; Dot the musician plays an accordion, except that for him and the little community he lives in, the accordion is a World of Many inhabited by Anneh, Robbreh and Viljastramaratan, magic beings, who the musician has to know how to coax and cajole into appearing and singing and dancing as the accordion's music, and the grandfather sends his grandson off to bring back an angel to cure his wife!!
The opening story in the collection, "Singing my Sister Down", is possibly the most well crafted, it has some pleasing word picturing. Look for instance, at this: "It stirred Ikky awake from her hung-headed shame; she lifted up and even laughed, and I saw her hips move in the last chorus, side to side." Or this, "I got up and started across the tar, and it was as if I cast magic ahead of me, silence-making magic, for as I walked — and it was good to be walking, not sitting — musics petered out, and laughter stopped, and dancers stood still, and there were eyes at me, all along the dark banks, strange eyes and familiar both."
It is evident that Margo Lanagan has sponged in a great deal not just about the magicks, stories, spells and geographies of Australia, but also about the witchery of words and the landscapes of word-making for she treks through language with a sure compass, a strong pair of well-clad feet and an ungiving rope.
Lanagan is a creative-writing teacher's delight; she concocts words into unusual, new, different uses that do their work to great effect. Worlds come together in Lanagan's stories that we have got used to putting into separate containers in our now-stories - fantasy stories in magic boxes, real-like stories into real-like boxes — going from one to the other ticketed with frameworks, measures and the like.
Lanagan's stories are like earlier-time stories, when all stories were one story, and if you travelled in them, you never knew where you were going, or how: you could, suddenly, fall through a hole in the earth to a world down below or turn a corner and enter an enchanted field, you could be taken to see real men and women at work or you could be called upon to work magic yourself. And it is this sort of world that Margo Lanagan's stories inhabit.
A celebration
Apart from the sheer pleasure of reading good writing, hard-worked, smoothed and roughed till taut to strum at the least touch, Black Juice makes you re-member parts of knowing that we keep under ice, frozen for easy passage through this well-organised world which demands we be one thing at a time. Black Juice is a celebration of the manyness of all things — this world, its people, human wording, storeying and living.
Margo Lanagan lives in Sydney and this is one of three short story collections, which have won awards including the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, Aurealis Best Young Adult Fiction and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Young
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