search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

Jim Taylor
Play The Monster Blind: Stories by Lynn Coady, Doubleday, Canada, Copyright 2000, 228 Pages.

When The Promised Land, Tessie Gillis's collection of short stories was published in 1992, with its occasional scenes of drunkenness and cruelty, one on my colleagues from Cape Breton said to me, "That's not the Cape Breton I know." Perplexed at the critical limitations of this position - all I could reply was, "Well, that's the Cape Breton she knew." The popular Cape Breton vision and the one that many people wish to maintain is doggedly rosy; the objection was that all was not rosy in Gillis's vision.

Lynn Coady's collection of short stories, Play the Monster Blind, and her very successful first novel Strange Heaven are similar to The Promised Land. Some people feel that all is not rosy in Lynn Coady's Cape Breton world either. Though her censure has a lighter touch than has Tessie Gillis's, both works embrace the received vision of Cape Breton as idyllic and pastoral, while challenging vital elements of that vision. In Play the Monster Blind the resulting tensions from this approach reverberate delightfully from story to story. And the reader, far from feeling that the idyllic has been sullied, should rejoice in the humanity of the Cape Breton characters who come to life in her landscape.

The first story and the title of Play the Monster Blind establish the distinguishing markers and reference points of the mythic Cape Breton scene as Lynn Coady perceives it. In mock eloquence, the opening line grandly announces the theme of the collection. Ringing like Vergil's "Of arms and the man I sing, we are told, "The father was drinking again, in celebration." The second line is equally significant, "John said it bothered him." Drinking and celebrating and the consequences of both in the Cape Breton tradition are an integral part of what Lynn Coady explores in this story.

Bethany, the narrator, John's girlfriend-from-away is baffled and confused by his dysfunctional family - a fascinating, delightful menagerie of misfits and emotional cripples who strike perplexing and bizarre postures - almost a kind of anti-voguing (if the term associated with the New York gay world could be used in a Cape Breton context). She tries unsuccessfully to understand them, while John and his mother - the stable ones - act as her guides and protectors.

The father - an alcoholic "built all of hard, stubborn fat," obsessed equally with the history of Cape Breton boxing in the old days, and his responsibilities as gracious host - insists on forcing Bethany to eat huge lumberjack meals of meat and potatoes and sharing tiny bottles of Crown Royal in the back seat of the car while they make the time honored ceremonial drive around the Cabot trail - the prerequisite experience (like the seasonal feed of Lobster) for the come-from-aways who are to be initiated into the mysteries of island life. The sight of the drunken father on the trip, walking at dusk with his arms outstretched, looking like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, provides the title for the story. Bethany tells John, "Boris Karloff had stretched out his arms before him like that because the film-maker had at first wanted to have the monster be blind. They never followed up that aspect of the story, but they kept the footage of Lugosi playing the monster blind anyway, and that was why the enduring image of Frankenstein ended up being this clomping creature with his arms stuck out in front of him."

Hugh, the younger brother who wears shirts with sayings like I'D RATHER PUSH A FORD THAN DRIVE A CHEVY and IT'S NOT HOW DEEP YOU FISH, IT'S HOW YOU WIGGLE YOUR WORM, is a "strange one," as Bethany comments in characteristic understatement. "Although he had gone to university, he spoke with an insanely nuanced accent that was nothing like the rest of the family's, and every second thing he said had something or another to do with his hole…. when she asked him what he did for a living, he replied that when he was not 'partying his hole out,' he worked with computers."

The mentally handicapped Uncle Lauchie, morbidly overweight - the fattest in a fat family - has fat that hangs "in an unpleasant sort of way, like it wasn't quite a part of him, something that had to be strapped on in the morning." After the mother, Bethany felt most comfortable with him because he was labeled - at least he was predictable: "It was good to have an idea what to expect." But this safe assumption provided only false security as she learned at the beach when Lauchie prepared to go swimming and pulled off his bathing trunks. Still she experienced a "profound triumph" when she managed to control him by stating imperiously, "You can't go swimming without your swim trunks, Uncle Lauchie." Indicating perhaps that she was becoming a bona fide member of the family.

The anorexic sister Ann wrestles in an absurdly playful fashion with her strapping brothers. With one hand John holds her two wrists, pushes her face to the floor, and sits on her. She screams "You fat bastard." The father laughs and the mother says "Johnny, Johnny, Johnny." Bethany can only conclude that this is "some sort of family ritual." Later when Ann is sharing a cabin with the family, she describes her "sick dreams" for Bethany. "Oh God, it was horrible. We were just doing all the things we've been doing all along." Her dreams are a Faustian hell of here-and-now nightmares, horrendously terrifying because they are virtual representations of her own life, itself a distortion requiring no filtering through an Alice-in-Wonderland Looking Glass.

With such a cast of grotesques, the story is, at least on one level, a parody ridiculing the traditional Cape Breton family (or implying that never was there a typical tarbish-playing, tea-drinking, rum-swilling, toe-tapping Celtic-Cape-Breton family of the likes of those wonderful craggy faces on the cover of The Cape Breton Magazine). The hideous, blind Boris Karloff/Frankenstein figure also represents Cape Breton. But as with much good satire, paradoxically the subject of attack emerges as not merely fascinatingly flawed and compelling, but also delightfully charming and endearing. Such is the case here. Dysfunctional as the family members appear, they care deeply for each other.

John makes a most revealing statement about the Cape Breton stereotype when preparations are being made for the "tour around the trail," his father's gift to them. John tells Bethany that "it was important"...and "that she would have to have fun." In this instance the imperative of having "to have fun" is not merely a matter of self-indulgence; it is rather a much more complicated thing - a statement about life in Cape Breton and about concern for the feelings of the father and the peculiar shame associated with being unhappy.

A recurring pattern throughout all the stories and the device that links one to the other is the refusal to offer a single, simplistic picture of Cape Breton life. As in "Play the Monster Blind," subsequent stories develop contradictory scenes. In "The Ice Cream Man" the narrator chronicles her unhappy childhood: the painful embarrassment she endured because of her mother's outlandishly self-indulgent behavior, and the horror she experienced because of the cruel treatment her friend Paula More must face. Paula "gang-banged and everybody knows. She was called Paula More 'n' More and Ball-a." Eventually she could not leave her house because "People were saying they were going to kill her."

Coady understands fully the dynamic of gossip in small towns. Here the narrator observes, "When you think about people gossiping, you think of them sitting around talking and talking about people until it makes everyone sick, but that's not really how it works at all. All it takes is one sentence every couple of days, a passing remark or joke. And then that person and all that is wrong with them is riveted inside your skull and if anyone ever says their name around you, it triggers all the remarks and the jokes in a flood - that's what you think of when you think of them."

The daughter despises the mother for her brassy, crass behavior - behavior typified by the many extravagant, brandy-sipping baths she takes when she wants to escape her family responsibilities. Initially the narrator admires her father because he is so unlike her mother - he seems to be everything she isn't. The mother's blowsy, ostentatious manner may have drawn ridicule and laughter from the community, but her father's passivity makes him invisible. Like a creature from a fairy tale he is the humble shoemaker "hidden away in the shop, hunched over soles. Everyone likes him, hidden down there." She wants to be like her father. But when the mother dies, she sees how maddeningly irresponsible and selfish he too is when faced with parental responsibility.

In the story's conclusion, the narrator mocks the teacher and the Bible during religion class. The story of the father Abraham sorrowfully preparing to sacrifice the son Isaac calls forth nothing for her but the anguished awareness that her own parents were ready and willing at any time to sacrifice her for their own ends. The story artfully comes full circle in its conclusion: daughter metamorphoses into mother as she confronts her bewildered father with her insistence that she will attend no more religion classes and that she will not eat supper with him. Then she storms out of the room screaming that she is "going to have a bath."

Although "The Ice Cream Man" presents a particularly gloomy slant on life in Cape Breton, it is, nevertheless, marked by Coady's signature trait - a sure touch for humor in the Cape Breton idiom. The neighbors, offended by the fact that the mother has no shame about having let herself go to fat whisper to each other, "Oh, look, if it isn't Herself"..."What's Herself into today?"..."Lord bless us and save us if she isn't into the make-up!"..."Oh, my dear God!"

Another story "Batter My Heart," much sunnier than "The Ice-Cream Man," deals with a comic struggle between Katy Leary's hot-tempered but diamond-in-the-rough father and Martin Carlyle, the charming, but roguish town drunk, who like the speaker in John Donne's Holy Sonnet will not be redeemed unless God batters his heart into submission as a blacksmith might shape base metal. Coady portrays the father as "the kindest man you could ever know," a lovable old soft touch who dotes on his daughter saying things like, "Come in and have a bite of tea, now, Katherine." Katherine sees her father in mythic terms. He is a "visionary," "a saint," "Stark raving mad." "One mean son of a bitch." He embodies in their unadulterated purity all the ingredients of the Cape Breton folk hero.

Coady's narrative vision contains some basic theological assumptions that are primarily Roman Catholic. To that extent her stories at times resemble the early work of Sheldon Currie, who in turn was influenced by the great southern writer, Flannery O'Connor. Coady's "Jesus Christ, Murdeen," creates its effect through its matter-of-fact treatment of a bizarre event placed in a religious context. Currie's "Jesus Creep" resembles Coady's story not only in the title but also in its satiric treatment of the Sermon on the Mount. And in Currie's "Sanabitur Anima Mea," a nun with purple pubic hair, who is beaten and humiliated for trying to help people stop smoking, is clearly a female Christ-figure, not unlike Murdeen in "Jesus Christ, Murdeen."

Coady is like a dexterous puppeteer as she manipulates the levels of point of view using the uneasiness of parents and the neighbors over Murdeen's decision to do something considered odd by the standard of the community. Initially Murdeen's decision to take up walking is viewed as strange and unnatural. "The only people who go for walks are old women and men who have been told by their doctors that they have to get more exercise." Typical is the question asked by her father, "Where's she going to walk to?" In short everything in life must have a clear purpose. Consequently the next step in Murdeen's transformation, her decision to walk bare-footed, is no more baffling.

The story's satire depends largely on the dogged and consistently unaltered tone of the mother's bewildered irritation. When she hears that Murdeen claims to be Christ - the way, the truth, and the life - her distress is no different in its intensity of expression than was her initial irritation when she discovers that her daughter has taken up walking, and then walking in bare feet. It is merely another instance of unacceptable behavior. Still, it is the kindness of the residents in the Old Folks' Home that resolves the predicament. "Born in farmhouses, raised up on hills or in remote valleys, where to come across another human being, no matter who they were or what they had to say was a deep and unexpected pleasure - therefore humble, charitable, and polite - the old folk listen, lined up side by side in front of the piano." Thus is gentle tolerance neatly juxtaposed to judgmental intolerance.

In "Look, and Pass On," Bridget, an unmarried woman of eighteen, a Catholic who has recently had a baby, is referred to disdainfully as the thing by the young man who is driving her to Montreal. The only story told from a man's point of view, the narrator is obviously intrigued with his passenger and determined to bed her. He begins, "The thing was eighteen and she wore her dead grandmother's underpants." No doubt, the narrator calls her a thing because he does not understand her, and also because he wants to use her as a plaything. However, she will not allow herself to be used, nor will she be pulled into his inferno of affectations. And so, perhaps, she is also a thing because, rock-like, she offers a kind of passive resistance to his overtures. What most baffles and vexes him, other than her common sense Catholicism, is her refusal to play along with his pretensions. "She was the only girl he knew who didn't insist people think her smart." She is offhandedly unimpressed by his reflections on Dante's hell; and when he urges her to purchase thong underwear instead of wearing her grandmother's, she observes in an affected Cape Breton accent, "There is no reason to buy a thong.... I can just pull me underwear up to me chin and it'll go straight up me arse like so." As is evident in this instance and throughout, Coady's works are refreshingly free of graphic erotic and pseudo-erotic descriptions of sex. Any scene that hints at the sexually explicit is headed off by parody. Bridget's common sense Catholicism, the other point of vexation, is also grounded in a culture that thrives on self-mockery and is forever vigilant against pretentiousness.

The finest and most layered story in this collection of exceptionally fine stories is "A Great Man's Passing," in which two narratives are joined: one dealing with Bess's relationship with her impoverished relatives, the disreputable Sloanes; and the other, her relationship with her immediate family - father, mother, grandfather (the great man), grandmother, and her own love-child, Dylan. Bess has been compelled by family pressures to take a job as a waitress at come-from-away Red Rufus's tavern, which provides the setting for much of the story's action. Red Rufus's real name is Rufus Bank, but he had "noticed that everyone around here had nicknames...one of the things he loved about the place." Also "he was afforded the status of 'a character' because he was rich and American."

The story abounds with clever reversals and ironies. Bess first knew the Sloanes when her parents brought them bags of used clothing. Later when Bess is a single parent, a kindly neighbor asks if she would like to have some of the children's clothes promised to the Sloanes. At the wake of the great man, the first thing the mourners see hanging in the front yard as they arrive is a buck that was shot out of season. For Bess, both her grandparents are ghouls, including the "great man." Her grandfather's chair emanates the 'stink of ancient smoke and piss." When he is taken to the hospital the Grandmother, old and doddering, mumbles, "Poor Ian... Croc a nian, scat a nean - which was a song about salt cod that she recently had been mistaking for the Our Father." But when the grandfather dies, Bess is stunned by the adulation and reverence he receives from the Ontario relatives. "Ah, Bessie, you don't remember him like I do. What a man. What a great man. The stories he used to tell. But a simple man, you know?"

Bess's life is complicated, even tangled. Her childhood affection for her father has soured. She knows he sees her as an irresponsible hippie, and she is infuriated with him for telling "unfair truths."(118). She knows that her own transgression (her illegitimate child) has given him license to abuse her. Though she tends her failing grandparents and helps her mother with thankless household drudgery, her father insists that she be grateful for the job he has managed to inveigle out of Red Rufus, while the two palavered on a fishing expedition. She takes the job, of course. What else could she do? Bess knows she is often selfish, but she is never dishonest with herself, nor does she lie to herself about her motives. When offered the job with Red Rufus, Bess allows that she would have been happier to stay on pogey and look after her boy Dylan. Yet at the grandfather's funeral she feels sorry for her father: "She knew that he was the angriest man in the world and that it was her fault. That his father had died and that he was poor and then not poor and then poor again, that he had been an alcoholic but then got to a point were he had to quit, and so quit, all by himself, without any help from AA or anyone. It was her fault because she had done nothing the right way. She had done nothing in her life to make any of it worthwhile." This quality of brutal self-examination marks all of Coady's central characters (who also happen to be women).

Bess appears again in the final story of the collection, "Nice Place to Visit." Still seeking escape, she temporarily leaves behind a pouting Dylan and takes a holiday to beautiful British Columbia to visit her cousin Meg. Though Bess has trouble coming to terms with the new life style, she is enticed by Meg's self-assurance. Meg, freed from habitual drinking and the oppressive weight of parochial Cape Breton, is living with Lyle, an attractive young man. But Meg's new life has a darker side as Bess discovers: her relationship with Lyle is tortured by many difficulties, including the presence of a charming gay doctor. Meg has not escaped. Bess realizes that the idyllic alternate life-style of the West Coast is nothing more than a façade for problems at least as serious as those she faces in Cape Breton. Her initial desire to move west cools; she will return to her pokey apartment in Industrial Cape Breton. She will face her inescapable difficulties with the supports of family and community. This story suitably concludes the collection - a collection that satirizes and mocks the myth of the Cape Breton life-style, but ultimately affirms its values.

These stories, particularly "A Great Man's Passing" abound with energetic and colorful scenes that catch the eye of memory like Kreighoff paintings - proclaiming the spirit of fellowship and generosity that characterizes the best of the old Cape Breton way. And the many vignettes, lengthy and artfully rambling, have that ring of truth that tells us we are not celebrating merely the passing of a great man but the passing of a bygone time.