This is a strong first collection of short stories from a young Canadian writer. The narrative style is fragmented, shifting, the prose gravid with surreal imagery: "Silvery trees are splattered across the horizon like a line of upright fish." Travel is the central theme. From Britain to France to Latin America, the journey involves escape from modern amnesia and an attempt to rediscover the lost link to the transcendental.
In `Eel Fishing', the natural world provides the counter-sign as a young woman, who has emigrated from South America to London, finds a parable in the collective migration of eels. The rites and beliefs of submerged cultures are an obvious source of lost knowledge. In the story titled `The Rainy Season' an anthropologist in Brazil contemplates the frontiers of civilisation and the perilous position of the one who has the courage to dare the margin. The act of writing itself becomes a way into the lost mystery in another story in which a young woman exiles herself to a tropical island to write that island's history.
The quest for love is a parallel journey. Gay, homosexual, bisexual and variations between, McNeil's lovers are selfish, whimsical, non-committal, always on the brink of departure. That at least describes the men. There's a proscriptive feminist agenda in her presentation of the dialogue between the sexes. The women are always the ones trying to discover the deeper layers while the men just want to go ski-ing.
Ger Mulgrew is a writer and critic