A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies
By John Murray

     If you enjoy Russian novellas whose narratives draw on scientific inquiry and discipline, or Martin Amis’ post-apocalyptic human-experience stories in Einstein’s Monsters, or the work of open-ended gentle revelations in Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s Harkening, you will savor the eight stories in this collection by physician John Murray.

     Murray’s stories weave recurring themes of doctors, insects (butterflies and beetles), fish and fishing, parents leaving their normal lives, children returning to India, and people trying to make sense of the world through science, questions of faith evoked by the Christ imagery of fishing, to create a compelling, lyrical vision of humanity.

     The characters’ narrow focus defines their epiphanies in each of the stories: the obsession, in “The Hill Station,” with avoiding a failed love affair and an Indian heritage; finding a runaway father in Key West in “All The Rivers In The World” (in which the theme of healing in a war-torn land and of witnessing slaughter in a church is introduced); making sense out of the world through a grandfather’s butterfly collection in the title story (in which neglecting an intimate relationship for insects appears for the first time); returning to India to find a father (a familiar theme) in “White Flour”; making sense of the world through saving a life and being saved oneself in a war-torn African Jungle in “Watson and the Shark”; an abandoned husband and father’s intense study of his wife’s psychology books to discover the psychosis behind the eerie noises he hears in the house he built himself in “The Carpenter Who Looked Like A Boxer”; a son trying to atone for accidentally shooting his father by making his father’s ascent of Mount Everest in “Blue” (revisiting the theme of crimes in the family); finally, a surgeon narrowing his vision, so to speak, by repairing eyes and turning an eye inward to his parents’ troubled marriage, his betrayal of his brother, and his father’s mania for beetles, science, Darwinism and order. In Howard-Johnson’s style, the stories are left open-ended--no huge climax, rather a soft epiphany that, a la Amis, is apocalyptic in the characters’ complex lives.