Story collections, more than any other form, are able to push boundaries. A collection offers the space to explore ideas, sometimes outlandish, that may not work in a novel, and Laura Jean McKay’s second collection, Gunflower, certainly delivers on that score.
Cats at the Fire Front, for instance, is about a couple who are farming cats like “hairy, fattened livestock” for their fur. Weird things seem normal in this place: an Alsatian rug, dog-hide carpet, dachshund foie gras canapés, foxhound feta.
In Come and See It All the Way From Town, Dad has been watching the rocks on the farm hill; two young people camp among the rocks and “[the] voices were immediate”. Nugget the dog can speak certain words, so can the rocks, making me think of sacred land, named rocks.
In Ranging, all the men have gone. There is sadness and despair in a support group: “If she thinks about her brothers beyond the oval, even just Luke’s voice, she’ll lose it in this circle.” Yet there’s also a sense of freedom as, after all the talk about missing their men, the women peel off their tops and bras and run whooping down the road.
In the marvellous Site, April is living in a tourist town and painting the view when a huge ship comes in. People obsessively debate its colour – they think it’s brightly painted but April sees only grey. There is a site of cultural significance, a cave where Wadawurrung women “gave birth for millennia”. Meanwhile, April is waiting for her ex to turn up, locked in her anticipation. “She can see the ship from the corner of her eye – straight on, she doubts it’s even there.” By the time the ship, with its costumed figures on board, ploughs up on to the land, it hardly seems strange at all, rather the right thing to happen next in this story. “Their wigs shimmering in the cold air, red jackets with shining buttons, big old guns.”
These stories, apparently written over a period of two decades, offer up concepts that are not always explicable yet they have a life of their own. McKay, an Australian who taught at Massey University for some years, creates a kind of word-scape that makes perfect sense, like looking at the otherworld elements in a picture of the Australian artist Shaun Tan.
At other times, the narrator is “more-than-human”. In King, a harsh power struggle plays out between an older rogue kangaroo and a wannabe “king”. It’s clever. “When you’re in the state I’m in, the local waterhole is a good and a bad place to go.”
To perhaps ground the reader in the familiar, though, there are also more realistic stories. Nine Days is about the death of a baby, while in the titular story, Joan goes aboard an abortion ship anchored off the US coast. The ship is Icelandic, operating under the laws of its own flag, its original name slashed out and replaced with Gunflower: “Gun – the old Norse for war – and flower, obviously, the seed part of the plant, its reproductive organs. Birth and death.”
On the ship: “Being there was like being in the stomach of a whale. I was Jonah, inside something very alive – both strong and fragile.” Yet the ship is having trouble getting through to the lawyers to confirm the go-ahead; it’s a small taste of what is to come in the story.
Meaning sometimes seems opaque, but these mesmerising stories demand to be savoured. Like the best poetry, things don’t always have to make complete sense; the reader can take what they will. Gunflower is an excellent follow-up to McKay’s first collection, Holiday in Cambodia, and her award-winning speculative-fiction novel, The Animals of That Country.
