Mythologies of Loneliness
Sam Reese — On a Distant Ridgeline
Platypus Press
Price: £10.50
ISBN: 9781913007133
Review by Georgie Proctor
Sam Reese’s new collection of stories, On a Distant Ridgeline, is as impressionistic and tantalisingly unattainable as it’s title suggests. Containing narratives that are driven by the sense of travelling through a place, there also acts upon each story a more insistent desire — something which is first introduced in ‘and the glow worms sing’ as the need to ‘make a character look inside a landscape’ in order to understand themselves. Reese’s study of this idea culminates in a gathering together of narratives that are rustically harmonised through themes of nature, craft and identity. Each story is sculpted with the same instinctive lyricism as the tiny vases fashioned in ‘Small Homes’– ridden with an anxiety for connection, each holding its own mythology of loneliness.
Tackling disparate subjects, ranging through free-diving to the art of ceramics, from Ancient Greek theatre all the way to the harvesting of macadamia nuts, many of Reese’s characters approach the reader at a time of crisis — at a pivot where numbness following an emotional experience threatens to give way to a raw re-encounter. Grief and disconnection are at the crux of these tales, whether that be for an abandoned love loosely based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in ‘Acts’, the deaths of a father and partner in ‘I Go Astray’ or an abusive partner in ‘Cataracts’. ‘The Difference’, positioned in the centre of the collection, is a virtuosic piece of meditative prose poetry on the topic of loneliness. Growing out of a debate on the synaesthetic interchangeability of blue and green, the narrative might feel at first like it’s academic in its register. That said, it also pulsates with a jittering sense of high-functioning anxiety and a desperate desire to be understood:
‘Two feelings can build up out of the same experience, maybe even share the same name, but they can mean quite separate things to the people concerned — and this is what concerns me. We could hold the same carved piece of turquoise and, although the object seemed the same, you might call it greenish-blue, and I blueish-green — where I have the deep sensation of the ocean churning somewhere in my chest, you might feel the serene expansion of an open sky.’
The struggle between connection and isolation is also particularly strong in the stories that address, or are narrated by, a young person. ‘And the glow worms sing’ carries the tragedy of a young teenager named Felix who is forced to grow up quickly in order to look after his younger sibling, Josh. Whilst Felix is faced with the task of growing into a young adult in a foreign country, tackling the complexities of the new physical and emotional world that he finds himself in, what remains the most consistent within his decision-making is his shielding of his younger brother’s childhood. While Felix’s character arc is always going against the grain of the reader’s expectations, he grants his sibling the simplicity and freedom to live as lightly as possible through the little lies that are told to him. Felix reforms and retells Josh’s landscape into something that is safe and reliable — beginning with his description of their grandfather’s nets, then again with the birds nest in the first tree that Josh learns to climb, and finally with the glow-worms that sing in the mines.
The strength of the sibling experience, and the implied trauma of childhood, also feature in the third story of the collection, ‘Small Homes’. The narrator searches for his identity through his vase-making and also through the ‘glaze’ of memories about his youth. With the nurturing of his craft, he fights the hollowness that he and his sibling have felt in the past: ‘When you press your finger in — when you force the brush — something gives way, yes it’s lost, but something new is made. That’s the definition of making an impression.’ What is natural and what is man-made is also another lasting preoccupation for many of Reese’s narrators, with equal weighting of the two entities blurring and jarring across the collection as a whole:
‘It would seem I’m always heading in the wrong direction. In the mornings, they commute from villages still huddled in the rolling hillside, in the flourishes of forest, down towards the city like the train lines are a river, and they’re caught, in a tidal rush, a downhill exhilaration. At night they are salmon, skipping home to spawn, while I sit in silence and watch green blur endlessly, then flash into a sudden, brilliant white.’
Sam Reese’s characters and causalities tend to leave their reader guessing. ‘Character is that sum total of moments we can’t explain’, George Saunders writes, and Reese resists any tying up of loose ends. In this way, reading the collection can be much more like grappling with a series of open-ended prose poems than digesting the more traditional tight-structuredness of the short story form. The collection also stresses the diversity of reactions to isolation or grief, and Reese’s characters act out of their pain with a great range of reactions. There are ghostly disappearances like theone in ‘An Experience’, and also acts of nihilism, like the perhaps deliberate free-diving tragedy at the end of ‘I go Astray’ — ‘that’s why you need a partner — because, once you learn the art of letting go, it is easy to embrace the emptiness’. Whether it is true that an uncomplicated emotional connection between Reese’s characters is possible, that ‘there’s a blurring in nature that says, I am you’, this is not a revelation that the writer will give out cheaply. Instead, he leaves us teetering between unfulfilled possibilities — ‘Emptiness is tantalising,’ he writes in ‘Small Homes’, ‘we long for that space we can pour ourselves inside.’
