Book Review: Unexpected Weather Events by Erin Pringle

Pringle’s third collection of short stories finds the author exploring in greater depth some of the themes that are central to her previous work. In ‘Another Cancer Story’ a young girl deals with the slow deterioration of her father from terminal cancer and witnesses how this impacts her mother and brother, with the added complication of her father and mother having been separated before the diagnosis and his moving back in to the house for his final months. The relationship between the girl and her father, and the shifting landscape of her relationship with her mother and brother in the face of her father’s impending death are beautifully presaged in the story’s opening paragraph:

Before they knew of the cancer, finding a goldfinch dead in the frost was not a sign of cancer.

          Before their parents separated, a dead goldfinch’s broken wings did not seem like the time-frozen family album where those in the beginning of the album would vanish from the middle, having relocated to another house’s frames and albums. Into new configurations.

‘Valentine’s Day’ sees three brothers make their way to a shopping mall to buy milk for the cereal they plan to eat for dinner while their mother is out on a date. Their mother has moved the boys to this new town to try to make a new start after the suicide of their father a few years earlier and amid the possibility of a romance between the eldest boy and a young woman who works at the mall we perceive how totally uprooted the boys feel, how adrift they are in this new and unfamiliar world without their father and with their mother at the start of a new relationship:

His death has turned them into a family of maybe-maybe nots. Never knowing. No longer believing effects flow from clear causes, or believing in a difference between cause and effect. Now, they touch more – each other, friends, walls, the top of the television, the microwave glass, shelves, dust – as though to confirm what exists, or that they exist, or for assurance. Maybe those are all the same. Maybe they aren’t.

In ‘Chair, $75 OBO’ a woman imprints the ghost of her long departed sister onto a woman who turns up at her house to buy an old rocking chair she has advertised as being for sale. ‘The Visit’ offers a new take on the Nativity when a couple fetch up at a house on a snowy night with their newborn baby. In ‘A Game of Telephone’, a woman is momentarily convinced she will be able to talk to her long dead friend through a toy phone her daughter hands her.

The standout story in this collection of standouts, though, is ‘Water Under a Different Sky’, in which, via some arcane sleight of hand involving a bike, puddles, and the mucky trails leading to a local quarry, we find a young girl transported to an alternative version of the here and now where we witness a holocaust in the making. Through innocent eyes we get to see a true horror unfold slowly but surely and by implacable degrees. It’s an astonishing piece of work.

For all that this collection examines the heartache of loss and the destructiveness of the world around us (‘Room Under the Stairs’), it’s important to highlight, though, that at the centre of all these stories is the warmth of love and family, which is made palpable through the keen eye of Pringle’s beautifully crafted prose.

Unexpected Weather Events by Erin Pringle (Awst Press, pb, 322pp, $20.00)