Bombed out of his pram in wartime England, Roger Nash survived to grow up in Egypt and Singapore. Though he may suggest a figure from fiction, he’s real, and currently poet laureate of Sudbury, Ont. These 22 stories (eight previously published) constitute his book-length fiction debut.
Sparing us the Blitz, Abu Sultan takes us to a fishing village on a salt lake at the edge of the Sahara. The smell of the day’s catch mingles with the resinous perfume of date palms. Goat hooves against cobbles compete with a muezzin’s call to prayer and the distant firing of Bren guns. Small fish plop from faucet into kettle; tap water and tea share the same shade of brown. Boys play sandlot soccer, each lad festooned with “blue ribbons of flies.” A lunch of watermelon, stared at too long, “becomes embarrassingly self-conscious.” In rare downpours, the roof leaks extravagantly. “A shelter could become unsheltered, a house become the weather.” Our young narrator’s world has no divide between the real and the fantastical. The poet’s cadences are evident here, but undemanding, serving the cause of sensory immediacy. A spectacular blaze at the local mosque triggers just enough plot.
In Doors, a computer whiz lands for a first-ever stint in Zanzibar, where the hotel manager delightedly welcomes him “back,” though there’s no chance they’ve met. The tale’s highlight may be its description of a first encounter with the notorious durian fruit: “butterscotch with a fine sherry sauce” on the palate, back-dropped by the scent of fox manure, “mouldy onions and turpentine.”
The Choirmaster offers a sentimental parable of a gifted musician ill-used by fate and two world wars. Pitched with similar sentiment, A Cobbler imparts homespun wisdom from an old Irish shoemaker to his attentive grandson, while another tale presents a childless couple who receive a mystical hint that a conception may be imminent.
Some stories gratify with their unpredictable turns. A tourist alone in Amsterdam wonders why restaurants offer two menus, one charging twice the price for identical dishes. The eventual answer proves euphoric. In A Legend, a sick cantor at a synagogue co-opts Sammy the singing goldfish into grudging emergency service: “I’m no bottom-feeding proxy-fish.”
In Growing Up Under a Table, a grandpa insists that bread always falls butter-side down, with two exceptions: When mother butters the wrong side, or when it’s tied butter-side-up to the back of a dropped cat. Other falling objects, of German origin, soon prove cats and butter insignificant. Early childhood, rendered surreal by wartime, is strikingly evoked here and in a following story.
Nash sometimes overelaborates his metaphors, while a few too many stories rely on stock characterizations or a jocular, tongue-in-cheek narrative voice that finally wears thin. The best entries avoid these self-conscious inflections, their sharp imagery and engaging story arcs making the prose itself recede.
Nash’s accomplished title story appeared in the 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize anthology. In a Saharan village, a young doctor on his inaugural posting experiences his first khamsin, or 50-day annual dust storm: “so sand-laden, it flies in as squadrons of airborne dunes.” Even in his shuttered house, his eyes burn and the book he’s reading sheds a layer of grit with each turned page. By the end, sand is under his foreskin and spills from his camera when he opens it. A surprising final metaphor smartly integrates the tale’s themes.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail’s first-fiction reviewer.
