Review - Evidence by Ian Colford and In A Mist by Devon Code

Evidence
by Ian Colford
The Porcupine’s Quill, 2008

In A Mist
by Devon Code
Invisible Publishing, 2008

Reviewed by Ted Harms

Evidence consists of a dozen chapters, each focusing on a relatively narrow block of time or linked events but, as it says on the back-cover blurb, are all told by the same narrator. There is barely any cross-referencing between the chapters and they do not follow in chronological order; this approach is interesting and, if not for the blurb, could almost be seen as a collection of unrelated short stories.

The locations and events are varied, each chapter contains several poignant passages, and overall the collection reads very well. However, the narrator is generally passive – a lady abandons her disabled son in his charge, the ex-wife of a professor kicks him out of the professor’s house, and a co-worker, to save himself, labels the narrator as gay, etc. This passivity wore after a while and because of it, the narrator did not generally stir any feelings of sympathy or empathy. The narrator turns out to be a victim of war from which it can be inferred that this is the source of his emotional distance.

The last chapter, and probably the most recent episode from his life, describes a return to his home country, Albania, to meet a cousin in his hometown of Shkodër. The narrator describes the breakdown in infrastructure (trains not working, buses unreliable) and sees under-the-table capitalism first hand (he gets to the town by paying $50 American dollars to the nephew of a hotel clerk who has a car). His cousin is a university student and obtained unofficial permission for them to visit a mass gravesite that is in the general location of the refugee camp the narrator and his parents lived in; the separation of him from his parents is not written about but it is stated in this chapter that they are dead, so the excavation could provide him with the chance of collecting some of their personnel effects.

In all the previous chapters, locations and times were kept vague – he’s somewhere & sometime in Greece, Italy, the States, Canada (perhaps – only by inference in one chapter as the narrator is in a ‘province’), etc. and the narrator’s history is kept fairly vague. But in the last chapter, things become grounded very quickly with the mention of Shkodër, the nearby Rozafa Castle, the former Communist leader of Albania Enver Hoxha, etc. This sudden rootedness gives the sense that this chapter is the tent pole for the collection that all the other stories take cover under. Near the end of this chapter, the night before they were to go the gravesite, the narrator comes to realization that he has lived a selfish life and that that was going to change. How it changes or what transpires at the mass grave is not described but the chapter brings the collection to a satisfactory, hopeful, and relatively unambiguous conclusion.

In a Mist is also a collection of short stories and while it shares in the ambiguity of Evidence, its stories do not share a common narrator. These are mostly stories of lonely people, and in particular, lonely men – isolated and most with borderline social skills. One thread that runs through several stories is music – Bix Beiderbecke gets two mentions and one of his tunes gives the collection its title and the generic country & western music that is the soundtrack to an old man at his regular bar.

There are nine stories in this collection and all told in a very natural and unrushed manner; despite this, most remain unresolved at their conclusion, with many questions about characters or what happens next. Two stories are titled as taking place in the 1970’s and one in the early 80’s but, even though the others are not firmly dated, they nearly all have a 70’s feel to them – possibly coming from the characters being named Lloyd, Alice, Lionel, Roy, Lyle, Edith, etc. or it could be the gritty and open-ended nature of the stories that recalls the 70’s “dirty realism” school.

The weakest story is a one set far in the future. “The White Knight” deals with a student in the 22nd century who is a ‘chess metaphor theorist’ and his obsession with a scene from Casablanca; it fails because it hits the reader on the head numerous times that it’s happening in the future, which is jarring considering the natural way which all the other stories unfold.

One of the strongest stories is an odd one. “Edgar and Morty” tells the story of two childhood friends, their falling out, and meeting again many years later. It’s a wonderfully difficult story to pin down, time- and jargon-wise – on the one hand, there’s mention of gypsy treasure, fishmongers, Edgar grabbing a pistol (not a gun), and pots of ale; by contrast, there’s also newspapers, the children exchange insults of “Jesus bastard!” or “Go knob your dead slut mother”, and the purchase of dime-novel “Mutiny on the Sierra Madre”. Despite the juxtaposition of terms and events that don’t quite jibe, the story works and works well.

Code’s observations are quite sharp, finely tuned, and the stories have ‘flow’, even though there’s nothing linking them to each other. The general economy of words is well balanced by leaving enough for the reader to go on but also allowing things to be inferred and assumed.