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Black Juice by Margo Lanagan
01/12/2006 . Source: Paul Skevington 
pub: Gollancz. 230 page hardback. Price: £ 8.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-57507-781-6. Buy Black Juice in the USA - or Buy Black Juice in the UK  check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk
When I had finished the first story in this anthology by Margo Lanagan, I discovered that I had an odd reluctance to proceed any further. This is by no means an uncommon experience for me, particularly whilst reading those authors whose writings are, shall we say, less than enthralling.
This time though, the motivation behind this feeling was entirely different. My desire to stop did not arise from my usual feelings of despondency at encountering the overly familiar or the familiarly awful. I didn't want to continue because the first story in the collection, 'Singing My Sister Down', was so good and so powerful that it made me fear that if I continued further within the volume I would be sure not to encounter anything half so good again.
Thankfully, in this I was entirely wrong.
'Black Juice' is a collection of eleven stories, each of which is uniquely affecting and worthy of discussion. The aforementioned first story is the tale of a woman who has committed murder and been sentenced to death. This sentence to be carried out by forcing her to walk out onto a tar pit and then stand still until she sinks completely into it. This process is excruciatingly slow and during it her family are allowed to gather around her, keeping her company until the final agonising minutes are over.
The terrible scenario of a family gathered for their daughter's execution is awarded more depth by the process of waiting. Family politics are brought to the fore and then discarded as insignificant in light of what is happening. It's a story about resistance in defeat and the importance of celebrating life even in the face of death. It is almost indescribably good, so I'll end my description here.
The second story, 'My Lord's Man', changes the tone immediately. A manservant narrates it as he chases after his master's wife, led by the aggrieved husband himself. She has fled with some travelling folk, possibly fatally injuring a maid in the process. When they finally catch up with their quarry, the expected scene of bloodshed fails to emerge and something much stranger ensues, that the manservant Berry has a hard time understanding.
Despite the obvious differences, there are some striking thematic similarities between this story and 'Singing My Sister Down'. Both tales concern a disempowered woman who resists and gains back some of that influence, freeing themselves from a structure that seeks to consume them. Both also make obvious positive feminist readings problematic through the destructive and criminal nature of the women's methods in enacting this resistance. Lanagan's stories are surreal wonderlands infused with the bitter taste of reality, as beguiling as one and as morally complex as the other.
Another major theme in this collection is the fearful state of being unusual. Of being isolated by one's own difference to the majority. We see this in the tale 'Red Nose Day', wherein two men are assassinating clowns in a world entirely overpopulated with them. They each have different reasons for taking up their morbid mission, which posits reasons for this process of normative disassociation that have me contemplating even now the extent to which I am willing to agree or disagree with them.
The story 'Yowlinin' also features an outcast, forced to live at the periphery of society for the crime of surviving an attack by the malicious creatures that periodically plague their community. This girl longs to return to the fold and fixates on a young boy who she considers to be hers. It's a story about casual cruelty and the tendency of people to compartmentalise others for trivial reasons, the system of hierarchy, the status quo and our complicity with it.
'Wooden Bride' also concerns the struggle to conform, but is more interesting for it's strange take on wedding fetishism. In this tale, the narrator lives in a world where some girls go to bride school and spend years preparing for one special day where they will say their vows, have their photos taken and be perfect for just a few hours. All of the unnecessary encumbrances, like husbands, have been artfully removed from this process until we are left with an interesting critique of this most bizarre of modern ritualistic practices.
'House Of The Many' is also at least partially about escape from ones origins or surroundings. The story concerns a boy's youth and his subsequent escape from a small, cult-like community where a central figure is the father of most of the village's children and wherein the highest mysteries lie in the music the man produces. The boy's return is more significant then his exit though. It is at this point that we are confronted by the truth that where we come from shapes us to a great degree and that it is all to easy to forget the things that we leave behind, abandoning them in our quest for change and a supposedly better life.
The book concludes with 'The Point Of Roses' in which boys games played in the dark spreads the feelings inherent in certain objects further than they might have anticipated. Like 'Singing', it's a story of family, regret, happiness and hope for the future and epitomises the soul-stirring grasp of Lanagan's deeply magical prose.
This is a book that will shake the world of fiction, opening it up and pulling out precious salts for those of us who care about fiction as art. The repercussions will be felt for years to come.
Paul Skevington
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