Review: Short but not so sweet
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 11, 2013
Cage Life is a two-story collection (Still Life & The Usurper) with a thematic focus on coping with loss, the nature of love, obsession and abuse.Still Life is told by a wife and mother who has the perfect life as we often have it presented to us these days - but it is the perfection which is the problem. This story reminded me very much of Doris Lessing's Room Nineteen in how it deals with the reality of the dreams we harbour becoming a kind of stasis as we no longer have something to strive towards. There is an unexpected jolt to the narrator's still life though towards the end which inverts your perception and closes on a succinct and ambiguous note.The Usurper is about the kind of relationship that is usually seen as something to ridicule; that between a young woman and an elderly man. But it is treated with a great deal of respect here and gives a convincing portrayal of how such a seemingly off coupling could happen. But at the same time, we see the consequences and it begins to shape into a deeply disturbing study of abuse as one partner exploits the other. Though this time we have an interesting inversion in how the two people relate with the role of the strong and the weak being decided by their difference in age rather than gender.For a couple of slices of thoughtful literary fiction, I thoroughly recommend this collection.