DC Books, 2007
Read by Vincent Tinguely
At The Bottom of the Sky is a collection of linked short stories. A main character in one tale might reappear as an incidental figure in the next, lending the overall impression of a loosely-knit community – vaguely artistic, decidedly intellectual – interacting against the background of an anonymous urban scene.
The stories are not concerned with grand, climactic events – they’re more about moments of significance in situations that might otherwise seem banal. In ‘Paris’, a desultory conversation with a one-time lover suddenly gels around what had ended the relationship
‘You were fussing over something else, Robert. There was something that mattered more to you than our relationship. I could never really figure out what it was. But it was there and I didn’t want to be second.’
The last word fell out of my mouth. It was heavy and I wanted to take it back right away. With one finger, Robert pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose.
‘Really,’ he says….
The mood of the stories is generally cool and meditative. In “Daedalus,” Terrence, a former art student, pursues his craft in a loft – a practice that involves grandiose destructive gestures, including the immolation of all his student work. But he is observed at one remove by the narrator, a somewhat concerned friend. While Terrence frenziedly reworks an installation piece in the loft, the narrator tells (or re-tells) to himself a gruesome adult fairy tale about a little girl held prisoner in a basement by her family. In the confluence of these two narrative streams the reader finds clues to how art might be applied to life, in order to wrest a modicum of hope from an existentially hopeless situation.
Dubé repeatedly deploys this technique of layering a narrative, building up complications and resonances between seemingly unrelated strands – thereby bringing some of the real randomness of life into his stories. Despite this, the narrative flow of the stories is spare and clear and clean, allowing the reader to enter into them with minimal friction.
