ROOM 10.3 & 10.4 Audrey Thomas

1985

Digital only; out of stock in print.

The women in Audrey Thomas’s fiction are becoming saner—and stronger. Instead of grappling with internal demons, the terrors inside their heads, they are venturing to engage with the lunacy of the outside world, in particular with the antic struggles that bedevil women’s relations with men. In the early seventies, it began to look as if the current wave of feminism had spawned so traumatic an awareness of the untenability of women’s lives that they had to recoil—into madness or the supernatural. Realism seemed too limited, too narrow an arena for the pressing ambiguities faced by women. Audrey Thomas’ novels mark that up and down course. The early novels—a loose trilogy consisting of Songs My Mother Taught Me, Mrs. Blood and Blown Figures— trace her protagonist’s increasing dislocation. The latter two even extend this to the setting, in the metaphorical heart of darkness, Africa, source of the unconscious.

In the stories that followed, Ladies & Escorts and Real Mothers, Africa subsided from symbol into mere landscape, no longer quite so alive (and literally crawling) with danger. Moreover, her women sloughed off their housewives’ agoraphobia and carried their search for themselves into the wider world —and new locales, Mexico, Greece and British Columbia. Their newfound inde­ pendence often meant also divesting themselves of the men in their lives—a not always intended consequence. Audrey Thomas has become a sophisticated chronicler of the failure of modern relation­ ships, without overlooking the fall-out from these exploded mar­ riages, the children—the apex of contemporary triangles. Con­ nection between men and women fails because the ties between individuals are unequal. Increasingly, as women seize power, or come to subtly assume it from vain, weak men, the relationships dissolve, or last only as long as the women maintain a charade of male dominance. “It’s easier without a man,” observes one woman in Real Mothers, “but is it better?” This theme also infuses the surface of her intermediate novel, Latakia, in which the literary rivalry between lovers—the struggle for mental (territorial) land­ scape-exposes the cracks in the relationship. And her last novel, Intertidal Life, within its own scope, plays out the growing strength and independence—as well as the anguish—of a woman whose husband leaves her.

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I first met Audrey Thomas (whom I must call Audrey here, because to conform to proper journalistic convention and call her Thomas simply feels too absurd; who is this man, Thomas, I keep thinking), I first met her ten years ago. That meeting was occa­ sioned by an interview and might also have marked the end of any further contact since she isn’t particularly fond of interviewers. I had been attracted to her work because of her experience in Africa. Having recently returned from East Africa, I was reading whatever I could find by Canadians who’d lived there and written about it. (There was a spate of them: Margaret Laurence, Dave Godfrey, Dorothy Livesay, and Audrey.) I even wrote a short paper, “The Image of Africa in the Fiction of Audrey Thomas,” during the dying days of my career as a freelance academic (it’s obvious why it was dying: my title lacked a colon). (The article was reproduced in Room, Volume 2, Number 4, 1977.) At the same time, I moved to the west coast and started to read books by local writers. Audrey, then, represented a double vision for me, bifocal, not blurred. She was here and she had written about there. And she conjured up some intriguing aspects of the west coast—living on an island, being a B.C. writer and publishing with a small local press. None of these things seem terribly germane any more. As she states in the interview, she could live anywhere, no longer so bound by the sea. Her last two books are published by large “eastern”—that is, Toronto-based—publishers, and as noted, Africa has receded as a compelling force.