Terry Dowling, Amberjack: Tales of Fear and Wonder (Subterranean Press, 2010)
I confess: I never even heard the name Terry Dowling before reading this novel. But these days, any time a book under the Subterranean Press label comes up for grabs on the Green Man Review list, I pay attention and often raise my hand. The quality of the offerings from this small press (and especially the cover art) has, in my opinion, been getting better and better with every book I see, and this volume proved no exception.
The vibrant colors and surreal imagery of this Nick Stathopoulos cover will easily draw attention at a bookstore: a partial alien skeleton centered against the backdrop of a mountain sunset -- or perhaps sunrise. Like the subtitle of this novel, "Tales of Fear and Wonder," it promises that memorable and fantastical journeys await within. Given that the main title immediately evoked shades of Zelazny in my mind, I dove in eagerly.
In the introduction by Jack Vance (another name I'd never heard before), I discovered what I've been missing -- quite a lot, as it turns out. Terry Dowling is more than "just" a writer (if there is any such thing). He's also a musician, composer, and in Vance's words, "a man of many talents." In Dowling's Preface, I discovered that Amberjack actually began as a "song cycle." My ignorance of the term led me to consult Wikipedia, which defines it as "a group of songs designed to be played in sequence as a single entity," offering examples as diverse as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon and Schubert's Winterreise. Enlightened and now thoroughly interested, I read on to find that my suspicion about the title was correct: Dowling credits Zelazny as a strong influence on his title and on his writing in general.
Turning the pages led me to the first offering of the song cycle, itself titled "Amberjack." Each story is introduced by such a piece, each containing some beautiful imagery, as in "Bermudas":
To where the orange trees are burning fragrant for us/To where the birds are the gods of Mexico/To where the whole world's winds and waters/Fall to form a garden for us/The songs of our Bermudas make us go.
Bereft of supporting music, however, the verses sometimes left me vaguely confused and unimpressed. I'm sure there must be recordings of this song cycle in existence; I did try to search them out online, but came up, regrettably, empty. A more thorough search might well net better results, and it's been added to my list of future research projects. In any case, the lyrics provide a nice way to separate the stories, which range from the utterly innovative "The Lagan Fishers" to the long and complex "The Library," with ten more astounding tales in between.
In the beginning, I found myself floundering through each tale with numerous unanswered questions. But by the middle of the book I was riding the flow and forgot to question; and on rereading the stories, everything made perfect sense. I couldn't understand why I was ever confused in the first place. To me, that means that my mind was supplying, on the reread, critical information only given towards the end of each story. It's an arguable flaw; Dowling's style
seems geared towards leading with inference and innuendo, explaining and verifying later on. I normally don't care for that approach, but Dowling's vivid descriptions, intriguing notions, and well-developed characters pulled it all off beautifully.Each tale left me wanting to reread it almost immediately. Notable exceptions were "Toother," which I found just too powerfully creepy to reread anytime soon, "The Magikkers," which struck me as arguably the weakest tale in this collection, and "The Library," which, while well-done, was just too long and complex for casual rereading.
"Toother," by the way, has won the 2007 Australian Shadows Award and has been included in no less than four Year's Best collections. And "The Library" is apparently part of a longer story-cycle; Dowling notes, at the end: "For completists, 'The Library' falls between the events in Blue Tyson and Twilight Beach. For those new to the story, forget about back-story . . . Just think Zanzibar and Samarkand!" I suspect that readers familiar with those two books would enjoy "The Library" much more than I did.
My favorite stories in this collection, after much consideration, are "The Fooly," a short and sharp piece about a haunting gone wrong that left me grinning like, well, a fool at the end; "The Lagan Fishers," with an approach to alternate universes which I found simply brilliant; and "The Flashmen," a tale, in Dowling's own words, "about dubious heroes and misunderstanding"; it confused the heck out me at first but hooked me in solidly with its lush detail and complex morality twists.
I especially enjoyed the "Afterword" to each story, explaining a bit about how that tale came about; such information is like a glimpse into a writer's inner workings, and always fascinates me when offered. Finding out, for example, the considerations behind the short but intense story "Some Roses for the Bonestell Man" (which also evoked shades of Zelazny's style), adds an entirely new dimension to the tale on rereading. Likewise, I loved reading Dowling's explanation that "Jarkman at the Othergates" came from years of accumulated and initially unconnected research and reading, all spontaneously linked by a visit with Harlan Ellison.
In the end, Dowling is a name I'll be looking for in the future. The back cover blurb notes: "Fear and wonder, a powerful combination" -- an excellent summary of the contents of Amberjack. Relying on subtleties and nuance, rather than guts and gore, to convey intense creepiness, and with a fine understanding of psychology, description, and balance, this is a book -- and an author -- with a solid place on my bookshelf.
