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The fourteen stories in Susan Rendell's first collection In the Chambers of the Sea are the expression of a very sensitive and skilled writer. Her characters are born real; they inhabit contemporary Newfoundland communities and live through plausibly challenging ordeals with Spartan courage and, sometimes, wit and humor. They also have richly textured imaginations that allow us to know the meaning of their pain, losses, and triumphs. In fact, one of the features of this book is Rendell's luxuriant bounty of metaphors through which we leap out into other worlds of myth and wonder to really understand how her characters live. Especially prevalent are metaphors of the sea, which glue these stories together and create an alternative psychological medium in which her characters exist. Ultimately, though, the metaphors and imaginings of the characters usually dissolve in the face of immutable reality, which refuses to conform to their imaginations.

In the first story, "The Way to Get Home," we meet a middle-aged woman with a brain tumor who has been told she has only one or two years left to live. Her lover has deserted her, she has no job, and her only son lives far away. Lost in despair, she mindlessly takes an overdose of pills. However, she survives and is led back into the light, ironically, by a delusional older woman, Jessie, who is a toothless, destitute social pariah and a welfare recipient with multiple personality disorder. Yet, it is in Jessie that Rendell invests her social and spiritual values, showing us that human worth must be measured not according to our social status, but, primarily, according to the amount of compassion we show others.

Jessie, who has her own share of troubles, continually visits the narrator to offer her emotional and spiritual comfort and companionship. She brings her a toothbrush, tells her stories from the Bible to give her inspiration, cleans the floors, and provides a macrocosmic perspective on the narrator's predicament. She tells her, regarding her overdose, "What you did last night - that is not the way to get home." After serving her tea from a Christmas mug, she scrubs the kitchen sink and summons her to look into it. When they do, we see the reflection of "two shimmering women as beautiful as the souls of stars."

Similarly, in "In the Chambers of the Sea," another nameless narrator, a middle-aged woman, is hospitalized because of a nervous breakdown related to the death of her daughter by drowning. But institutions in Rendell's stories are cold, official, and clinical, contributing more to distress and suffering than to alleviating them. And so a young patient jumps to his death to land on the ledge just above the narrator's room, and another fifteen-year-old patient, Deirdre, is not allowed to be touched by anyone except her mother. Then there is Lenora: "Love is everything to Lenora; she must have it washing over her like a wave constantly; it is air to her, the gills of her heart are drying up for lack of it. ... No one ever comes to see Lenora except her son, and he looks like he just stepped out of the shower when he leaves; she soaks him with her tears."

The narrator here, though, survives through her own spiritual contemplations. Guilty of apostasy, she quietly ruminates one night in her hospital bed on the verge of an epiphany. She explains, "And then a line came to me from the Bible, I think, or maybe a hymn, or perhaps the Anglican liturgy: 'And the sea shall give up its dead.'" It is at this moment she realizes "The sea had held my daughter in its salty womb for less than one millionth of a second in God's time, and then she had been born into All That Is and Ever Has Been .... I started to cry then; satisfied, the nurse went to get me a pill. But I didn't take it." It's too bad though that the cover of this book doesn't reflect or signal this type of significant content or intricately spun language. Instead, it presents an impression of drab adolescence, which is not Rendell's central focus.

Other characters find their own way home too, such as Jimmy Joe in "Light Years." He was abandoned by his mother when he was six months old, raised by a benevolent family until he was eleven, but then moved in with another family who beat him routinely without cause. Later, he is reunited with his brother and finds his mother and father, but all to no end. His brother is killed by a car and his estranged mother and father separately refuse to acknowledge them.

Left with nothing, Jimmy Joe discovers art in the form of photography and realizes the importance of light, not only to art, but to life as well. Rendell provides Jimmy Joe with the cosmic idea that light and seeing must have a source, that "maybe we're all just eyes for some big intelligence, and the light's just bouncing off our lenses so this Thing can see what's going on." Jimmy is satisfied with the conventional Christian notion that life and afterlife are infused with light. Speculating about the death of a friend, he agrees with the priest's comment that his friend "had been baptized into Christ when he was just a tiny baby, and how he was going back to God just like he was a little baby again, all innocent and pure and full of light." Scenes like these show that Rendell expects a lot from her characters. They must be not only real but also engaged in philosophical thinking about the nature of the universe and their own presence here.

Although In the Chambers of the Sea is saturated with references and allusions to the Bible and Christian icons, and its characters often contemplate the afterlife and God, this book is authorially secular. With a few exceptions, survival for its characters comes from free-wheeling speculation about Heaven and God, not from conventional worship. When in trouble, these characters do recall Biblical passages and stories, but what really keeps them alive is their devotion to poetry, fiction, Greek and Roman mythology, and various fields of art, including sculpture, pottery, painting, writing, and photography. It isn't surprising then that Stan, an engineer in "Ozymandias in His Pyjamas," thinks that "poems and stories could be decoded like blueprints," and old English poems "were like well-designed buildings, or ships; you could climb aboard knowing you were safe from being sunk by some crazy metaphor or waves of stanzas with a load of existential debris on their crest."

To some extent, this idea applies to Rendell's own book, although she tends to be too digressive in stories such as "Justine" and "Estate of Grace," which move too quickly from one allusion or reference to another. When we start one of Rendell's stories, we sometimes ride on a concatenation of images and have to wait for the author to stop digressing and to achieve focus. But, when she does, the incredibly rich language opens up the story for us, especially through stunning details and metaphors. For example, in one scene in "Justine," we find Justine "looking into the little pool; a dead bee floated beside the faux flowers, making a shadow on Justine's reflection, a dark dot between her eyebrows." In another, she stares at her bathtub faucets, and "there were things in them Justine had no wish or need to see: dark lacunae in ruined towers; starfish with broken, bleeding arms; the faces of cruel queens. And the tipped eyes of the temple cats of Tibet, cobalt pagodas cutting a jagged line across their pupils." These are sharply delineated images that provide insight into the characters' feelings on a number of meaningful levels simultaneously.

There are also concentrations of humor and wit in these stories, the best examples being in "When I Was a Dog." Here the narrator, a young woman who feels she has to be the loyal dog to her lover-master, wisely thinks that "when a man is confronted with a situation that requires a decision, one lone neuron comes on in his brain and he must obey its dictates. Such as 'stay' or 'go.' But women's brains light up like little cerebral Christmas trees, and they may choose from a variety of responses; I believe this is called 'thinking.'"

Although there are lots of treats like this one scattered throughout the book, some readers will tire of Rendell's relentless depiction of husbands and male lovers as unfaithful, selfish, mono-brained, self-serving predators who leave their women emotionally destroyed. It is this frequency of the same type of character that limits the book's originality. Rendell's women, in contrast, are sophisticated studies of human beings caught in their weakest emotional moments. They struggle for survival and often escape the chambers of the sea that threaten to pull them down and drown them.

Above all, Rendell's stories seem to say that people matter, that their character and spirit are more prominent and substantial than their physical disabilities or vices. They are like Jesus in "Asking Jesus to Dance," who has "His heart on the outside of His chest where anybody could get at it." At points such as this, we know the stories are also about ourselves.