SAFFRON & BRIMSTONE REVIEW

Locus Review 2006:

Elizabeth Hand seems to have an issue with walls. A wall in a Manhattan loft turns into an immense slab of rock in 1999’s Black Light; a wall in a hidden London lane in 2004’s Mortal Love reveals to the poet Swinburne a seductive green world; the dissolute narrator of 2004’s “Wonderwall”—one of eight stories in her new collection Saffron and Brimstone—obsesses over how to “tear through the wall that separated me from that other world, the real world, the one I glimpsed in books and music, the world I wanted to claim for myself.” In fact, “Wonderwall”, which may turn out to be one of the iconic works in Hand’s oeuvre, is full of walls, but none of them are quite the happy knotholes-to-faerie that fantasy tradition might lead us to expect; in fact the first time a wall disappears on the narrator all it reveals to her is the overcrowded men’s room in tough gay disco in D.C. More to the point, perhaps, is the wall of her dorm room, where she paints in foot-high letters a line from Rimbaud, which she learns decades later would “bleed through each successive layer of new paint”, like a dream constantly trying to reassert itself. In “The Saffron Gatherers”, one of a new suite of stories included in the volume, a real Minoan fresco from the island of Santorini serves as another window into a lost world, preserved almost entirely through its art (Santorini was the site of perhaps the worst volcanic eruption on record); by the end of the story we’re left wondering what images might preserve our own civilization. In other words, walls may be a key metaphor for the sense of immanence that pervades Hand’s work, but it’s a complex metaphor: they can both separate us from the world of art and be art, and what they reveal when they disappear may be a transcendent landscape or a bunch of guys at a urinal.

Saffron and Brimstone includes three of the four stories from Hand’s World Fantasy Award-winning collection Bibliomancy, published in a small edition by PS in 2003, omitting “Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol” (now available as a chapbook from Beccon Press in England) and adding “Wonderwall” and the new story suite “The Lost Domain”, which includes four variations on themes of muses and nymphs: “Kronia”, “Calypso in Berlin”, “Echo”, and “The Saffron Gatherers”. Of the three stories from that earlier collection, the most famous is “Cleopatra Brimstone”, which seems on its way to becoming a kind of classic of the sort of seriously literary horror which has emerged increasingly in the last few years. Concerning a young student entomologist who is brutally raped and flees to London, where she alternates her days as a volunteer in the insect collection of the London Zoo with an ominous alter ego haunting the clubs of Camden Town under the name Cleopatra Brimstone (from the butterfly species), the story elegantly balances a kind of supernatural revenge fantasy with an acute awareness of the real horrors of women’s lives. As with all her fiction, the sense of place is palpable, though it’s interesting, given the autobiographical bits that show up here, that it’s one of only two stories not to use a first-person narrator. “Pavane for a Prince of the Air”, a heartbreaking fictionalized account of a friend’s death from cancer surrounded by aging flower children and mystics, becomes also a meditation on the usefulness and futility of belief. In “The Least Trumps”, the emotionally damaged daughter of a famous children’s book writer sets herself up as a tattoo artist in her mother’s remote island cottage in Maine. At a rummage sale she comes across a strange deck of mostly blank Tarot cards which may have belonged to another famous author whose young adult novels had guided the narrator through her adolescence, and whose final unfinished novel had made cryptic references to “the least trumps”. At the end, when the narrator tentatively achieves an emotional connection with an old friend, there’s a hint (well, more than a hint) of the John Crowley idea of immanent secret histories (and of course it’s from Crowley’s Little, Big that the idea of the least trumps is borrowed in the first place).

This leaves us with the remarkable variations on a theme that make up “The Lost Domain”, a notion borrowed from the 1913 Alain-Fournier novel (also translated as The Wanderer) by way of John Fowles, whose fascination with the idea of a hidden realm of imagination was detailed by Hand in a revealing essay she wrote for The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts in 1994 (the same essay in which she noted the poet Laura Riding’s description of this idea as “the false wall”). Representing an adventurous new direction in Hand’s writing, these four pieces range freely from fantasy to SF to postmodern narrative fragmentation; the brief opening overture, “Kronia”, explores a muse-like relationship through isolated, sometimes contradictory memories, at the center of which is the fall of the towers on 9/11. The more fully plotted “Calypso in Berlin” transforms Odysseus’s sea-nymph into a New England painter living in Berlin who entraps her favorite subject both literally—in a very creepy way--and through her art. Both “Echo” and “The Saffron Gatherers” move toward apocalyptic SF, the former story an aching parable of loneliness in a dying world—again told from the point of view of an isolated island in Maine—which casts the muse relationship in a variation of the myth of Echo and Narcissus, the latter concerning a science fiction novelist in Maine planning to move to the west coast where her lover has relocated. He’s sent her a book on the Thera frescoes from Santorini, which she once visited and which are practically the only evidence of the daily life of a destroyed civilization. But as her plane takes off from San Francisco, she witnesses another huge natural catastrophe, another world lost. The world may not be kind to muses in Hand’s beautifully orchestrated tales, but it’s a world whose gorgeous fragility, like the pistils of those tulips that are gathered for saffron, positively glows in these radiant tales.