Review of Kingsley McGlew’s 'Distance'

Jeremy Davies September 04

‘Tell us a tale ta start the day.’

Imagine, for a moment, Thomas Pynchon and Kenneth Cook sat down in an outback pub, one haunted by Banjo Patterson’s ghost, and decided to collaborate on a story to poke some harmless fun at Isaac Asimov…

This is a fictional backdrop for Kingsley McGlew’s Distance, but one that fits like the seam of a cricket ball into the hand of an A-grade spinner. Aussie tall story-thickness, sporting metaphors and thongs mix space uneasily with dreamscape androids and space-travel, the kinds that would’ve made David Bowie blanche, and maybe call for a strong pot of coffee.

As the title would suggest, and the author often re-states—sometimes unnecessarily—a variety of distances are explored, along with their relative closenesses. Relationships between people, between ideas, between philosophies and between viewpoints expand and contract, and Hans Angel struggles with controlling these things, the need for control, whether control is important, and the kind of free-fall gravity-based consequences that can arise from the distances that so develop. For Angel, perhaps like for all of us, it is easy enough to fall, but harder to chart the space between where-from and where-to.

And, in the end, what that space means.

And perhaps McGlew’s answer appears too conventional, but the question he has posed, and its delivery, is anything but.

McGlew exhibits a type of subtle science-fiction that levels a modernist challenge to the notion of the speculative: Structurally, the notion of who speaks is often called into question—since this is another distance—and the narrative style uses a mix of free-flowing Aussie yarn all the way to a kind of mechanistic staccato series of simple sentences, like action reduced to binary commands.

Maybe McGlew sometimes oversteps the boundary between flowing story-telling and dramatic style where the method is more available than the means, but once you’ve made the leap with him it’s as if you’re tandem sky-diving with his protagonist: there’s nowhere else to go.

Jeremy Davies once painted a fingernail black and no one really noticed. He was disappointed. He has had poetry/fiction/non-fiction published in a variety of places, in a variety of publications, in a variety of forms, in a variety of moments: Canada, Wet Ink, SMS and twelve minutes past three in the afternoon being some of these.

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