I picked this up with a slight sense of temporal displacement – a perfect state of mind in which to read a collection of short stories from the winner of the 2009 World Fantasy Award (for the brilliantly surreal Tender Morsels). White Time predates that book by nearly a decade and has only now been published in the UK as "new".
There is a great deal to admire about these stories, not least the author's terse, angular prose and her extraordinary talent for creating hybrid worlds. As in the best fantasy and science fiction, the characters and settings are familiar enough to resonate emotionally while remaining wholly other; Lanagan's vision of the world skews effortlessly towards the seriously weird.
Lanagan (below) has a sly line in emotions made concrete, as in the most successful story, "Big Rage", where a crushed and disappointed young wife stumbles upon a giant warrior (stinking, dressed in armour and gabbling in an incomprehensible language) lying wounded on her local beach. The warrior appears to be a manifestation of her fury, something called up from the depths of the ocean, of time and of her own psyche, in order to banish her greyhound-thin emotional sadist of a husband. There is nothing wistful or soft about this story and its resolution made me want to stand up and cheer.
"Dedication" tells the deceptively simple story of a young man, a dresser to the royal family, called away from his own children's christening to prepare the ravaged body of a beautiful princess for burial. It is a story of beginnings and endings, warning that sweet babes can travel unforeseen paths in life that end in disappointment, violence and waste. In "The Boy Who Didn't Yearn", a girl sees in her fellow humans what others cannot. She is a wonderful creation, just close enough to truth yet far enough from it to resonate powerfully.
Lanagan is most effective when refashioning fairy tales, connecting dark myths back to the human truths that first inspired them, in the days before Walt Disney turned all princesses into Barbies. All these stories were created around a writers' workshop in 1999, and if I have an objection it's in the slightly relentless feel of the invention. A first-person account of life in an ant colony has a certain power but also the whiff of a creative writing exercise. In "Midsummer Mission" I couldn't quite escape the ghost of Snap, Crackle and Pop from old Rice Krispies ads.
We know that Margo Lanagan is a hugely talented writer whose more mature work will undoubtedly be worth reading: eight years after White Time was first published in Australia, she wrote Tender Morsels. I look forward to reading whatever she writes in the (actual) future.
• The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff is published by Puffin.
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