Canadian Shield, Kelley Aitken, 128 pgs, Tightrope Books, tightropebooks.com, $21.95
One of the defining geographic and geologic features of Canada, the Canadian Shield, inspires awe, symbolizing the beauty and danger of the Canadian wilderness. In her new short story collection, Kelley Aitken takes the Canadian Shield as the stage and centrepiece for her nine emotionally devastating and exquisitely crafted stories. Aitken writes dense, layered stories that play with temporality and use the natural world as a mirror for the psyches of her characters.
Standouts in the collection include the unsettling story “Hunter”, and the companion stories “Woman in Ice” and “Hypothermia”, which beautifully depict the formation and dissolution of romantic relationships. In “The Wounded Bear”, Aitken captures the paranoia that comes from first-hand experience of the potential violence of the wild: “And then fear blooms in her stomach and she starts walking again, as fast as her load will allow, making noise, fumbling the whistle into her mouth … and clapping her hands to scare what is or isn’t there.”
One of my favourite stories in the collection is “Meromixis”, in which Tom finds himself in the throes of a sexual relationship with the mermaid he encounters in the lake. Tom’s desire to be with the her leads him to imagine building a “tank” or “backyard pond” to contain her, representing the desire to control nature. But the story’s main metaphor comes in the form of their potential child, who would mark a ‘holomictic’ union between species.
The tragedy of these stories undermines idyllic childhood fantasies of nature as a site of freedom and self-discovery, and instead insists upon the mercilessness of the wilderness. Aitken’s stories are dark, but tremendously insightful and empathetic. This is a smart, haunting collection. (Alexander De Pompa)