Patrick O'Leary defines his theme and his audience in the opening lines: "This is a story about monsters. The real ones. Not the ones we tell children about."
This is a fantasy -- in the tradition of Tolkien and of Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy, and of Greek mythology -- but written in a style that is not meant for children. There's lots of story here, but the ways the story is told are often more important than the story itself. With stories inside stories inside stories, The Gift is too complex for children to follow. (I wouldn't read this aloud to my son, Tim, even though the main character here is named Tim). Rather this is a tale that you savor yourself, alone, and then retell pieces and read isolated passages to your children.
As in Tolkien, the fantasy world has undergone an evolution. There was a previous age, when dragons and powerful magic were common. The "great race who fell from the sky" were powerful wizards. They were deathless, but also without physical embodiment. They traded their immortality for human form, that they might feel fully, as humans do. Hence they died out. But one of the gifts which they left for man was the ability to tell stories.
"Everything must have a gift and a price. We wizards once were spirit. But we long to be human. What was the price we paid?"
"Death, the Watermen replied.
"And the gift we gave?"
"Magic." (p. 15)
That prehistory gives the tale a remarkable depth of reality -- shadows and mysteries and secrets to be revealed that interweave from page to page. This is not just the tale of a handful of individuals. This is sacred book credibly explaining the fantastical true nature of an entire new world. And the psychology and revelations keep resonating in unexpected ways with human psychology and the meaning of life in general.
O'Leary shows great respect for words, and great mastery in their use. He luxuriates in them, as he luxuriates in story for the sake of story, with all the paraphenalia of myth and fairy tale. He creates his characters and their fantastical natures with loving care, and respects their unique psychology, building story from their nature, rather than moving them about willy-nilly as mere markers in a story more important than themselves.
For O'Leary telling is a way of knowing, and naming (as for Adam and Eve in Eden) is a way of controlling nature. He seems to delight in the complex and unexpected interrelationship of words and things, frequently concocting wild and beautifully poetic images that enrich the story.
"'What are thoughts but a type of music,' he had wondered. 'Music unplayed in the air. Perhaps his Majesty has become an instrument. Perhaps someday we will have such instruments that will retrieve such invisible music.'" (pp. 73-74)
Stories have magic, mythic power to characters within the stories.
"Do you see what happened to the King?" the Teller asked. "he got a bad story in him. ... I see you do not understand. Listen, then. There are stories that hide themselves inside of us like bats inside a cave." ( p. 156)
The world is alive and what today passes as inanimate nature truly has personality and purpose (as in the days of nymphs and dyads).
"The winds left abruptly without a good-bye, for winds, though they are never purposely rude, have no sense of manners." (p. 153)
"Eventually, through the days of this fever-dream, as Marty and Simon watched over him, he learned in silence and despair that a person was capable of containing anything -- any horror, any grief, any hideous notion that battered his skull. He discovered that the body has extra places reserved for these new and awful things, as if there were rooms within, like the unused forms of a great castle, rooms that could hold and honor and sustain infinite levels of wonder and pain. (p. 206)
His assemblage of "remarkable facts, survival tactics, reliable opinions, and gossip" (p. 126) is truly beautiful, with brief phrases conjuring entire new ways of looking at the world, and one such miracle following another and another.
"He learned the names of the southern winds who were more dangerous because they were more awake, the names of every tree along the timberline, the way to know a storm is coming when you cannot see it, to pass through an evil cloud with your eyes closed, the most intelligent birds and how to address them. Avoid flying after dark for the wind has nightmares, beware of bats: they are mindless; drink no water on the plain: it has gone bad; never trust a talking blue jay; always trust a magpie: they have the gift of human speech because they are the best listeners; sparrows are the most loyal but also the stupidest birds; gold finches are splendid messengers, so long as they fly toward the sun; all hawks are mercenary and unreliable; butterlflies are sacred children: do not disturb them; never fly in one day longer than you can walk in twenty, for it is possible to forget how to walk; beware of the the tallest trees to the south: they have a magic too old to fool with; gosis love a shadow; eat only the fruit from green trees." (p. 126)
He makes the abstract concrete and memorable ("the wind has nightmares"), and a phrase that in someone else's book would be a mere metaphor, here is a revelation of unexpected, inner truth ("never trust a talking blue jay").
Superficially, O'Leary's first two published novels are very different. Door Number Three is science fiction, and The Gift is fantasy. But both are explorations of alternative modes of understanding and of being. In both bases, the starting point is the fact that human understanding is limited, though in Door the world in which the story unfolds resembles today's world, and in Gift the world resembles the world of folk tale and myth.
O'Leary appears to be a ruminator -- one who ponders his work for years, and lets his characters come to life in his mind, and lets his stories tell themselves over and over again in his mind before they take finished form on the page. And these two stories both grew in his mind simultaneously, until they were ready to be born.
Both are excellent, but The Gift has the greater richness of language and story, gives you more reason to return and read it again, makes you wish that the story were indeed simple enough to tell to children, so you'd have a good excuse to read it aloud time and again.
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Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer
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