|
Publisher:
Boho Press |
Release
Date: January 2004 |
ISBN:
1-904781-01-2 |
Awards:
|
Format
Reviewed: Trade Paperback |
Buy
it at Amazon |
Read
an Excerpt |
Genre:
Fiction – Short Stories |
Reviewed:
2004 |
Reviewer:
Kristin Johnson |
Reviewer
Notes: Kristin Johnson, the founder of PoemsForYou.com,
released her second book, CHRISTMAS COOKIES ARE FOR GIVING,
co-written with Mimi Cummins, in October 2003. Her third book,
ORDINARY MIRACLES: My Incredible Spiritual, Artistic and Scientific
Journey, co-written with Sir Rupert A.L. Perrin, M.D., is now
available from PublishAmerica. |
Copyright
MyShelf.com |
|
The
Rainbow Man and other stories
By David Gardiner
James
Joyce meets Ray Bradbury in David Gardiner’s collection of
tales wrapped in the imaginings of children who hear a Cassandra/Wandering
Jew-type sage mutter such things as “Ye know the trouble with
youse northerners, your memories is too bloody long!”
Harlan
Ellison might have written “Letting Go,” inspired by
this fictional Delphic aphorism, if ANGRY CANDY Ellison considered
that a victim of the Holocaust might need to let go of the past.
Like all of Gardiner’s tales, the denouement of “Letting
Go” is bound in a taut rainbow circle love-knot that contains
truth. From the secretly vengeful ex-nun propitiating a religious
fraud on a smugly progressive church in “Immaculata”
to the lovelorn man and woman in “Blind Date,” each
thinking the other is too good for them, Gardiner’s characters
face the loneliness of illusion and the loneliness of truth. As
the war criminal of “Letting Go” asks, “That’s
all you want of me? The truth? A small thing like that?”
As
Gardiner’s returning prodigal Irish son in “The Lies
of Sleeping Dogs” discovers, the pretty truth is often the
only comfort we have. The young narrator of “The Oracle at
the Adelphi” learns that hell and heaven often come from the
same source, and the fire of the Adelphi parallels the blaze planned
by the Sir Lancelot-channeling protagonist of “Knight Errant.”
Fire and rain recur like yin and yang in Gardiner’s stories.
It
always rains in Ireland, from the foreboding drizzle of “The
Lies of Sleeping Dogs” to the cleansing downpour that enables
the Galahad-esque Benny of “Hand of God” to save a young
Muslim woman fleeing an arranged marriage. The rain of Heaven and
the storms in Gardiner’s universe blow into our lives not
only devils and voodoo priests, but angels as well, and sometimes
no one can tell the difference. As Benny’s Fatima (Our Lady
of Fatima?) explains, “Perhaps that’s all an angel is:
an ordinary man that Allah trusts.”
Through
the prism of Gardiner’s lens, angels, rain and light combine
to create the Rainbow Man’s remarkable bag of wisdom that
adults and children alike need to open. |