Gillian Walker, The World at the End of the Garden: A Novella-in-Flash, ed. Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2020)

Review by Liz Milne

What does weaving have to do with maternity? How does an arid arroyo resemble heather-bound Yorkshire moors? Gillian Walker’s 48-page chapbook provides some answers.

Moving to Arizona, to get away from the heartache and mess of fertility treatments which succeed only to fail, her ‘crazy fertility-hormone-induced behaviour’, and the couple’s lack of communication, causes hidden currents to surface in the very first line of the book: a mysterious circle of stones, streaked with semi-precious seams of ‘turquoise, lapis and chalcedony’. The narrator sees them and, without explanation, hides them from her husband.

Secrecy is a feature of their marriage: Matt has not told her that he would be living away during the week, she does not mention her foray into the arroyo with Samuel, nor does she tell him of the cracked patio, or that she is, miraculously, naturally pregnant.

When this baby is – seemingly inevitably – lost, the narrator’s tendency to secrecy continues, with the information being dispensed almost as an aside amid the dramatic landfall caused by the exceptionally heavy rain that has drenched the arid landscape: ‘I’m all shored up’ poignantly indicating that the narrator, unlike the desert, knows what needs to be done for survival – she has been here before.

The story, despite its unyielding tragedy, is nevertheless hopeful. The babies might never arrive: ‘you need to accept I can’t have children’, the marriage might not survive Matt’s working away, the advent of Julia who is, it is hinted, his lover as well as his colleague, and the rounds of treatment, hope, loss and despair, but the narrator, despite all this, finds a core of steel upon which she can build.

And while she cannot ‘incubate’ a child, she can still create. Her textiles have worth and root her to her life, like the quernstone, ‘too entwined’ to be moved, and are full of beauty: ‘dark like night, golden when lit by the sun’. The garden might end – but that, the reader feels, might be where a bigger, better world begins.

Each chapter works as a standalone metaphor-laden piece of flash fiction, a shining bead that, when threaded into this novella, transforms into a complete narrative.

About the Reviewer:

Liz Milne is a writer and PhD student in the Department of English, University of Chester. Her flashes can be found online at Zero Flash, 101 Words, Visual Verse, Aphelion Webzine and Drabblr. Longer pieces have appeared on Storgy and SWAMP Writing, while print credits are with Pandora’s Box and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine (for which she is also a regular reviewer). Her short story ‘The Swimming Pool’, entered into the 2015 High Sheriff’s Cheshire Prize for Literature, was printed in the anthology Patches of Light, ed. Ian Seed (University of Chester Press, 2016.

Find Liz at:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElizabethMilne1

Blog: https://lizmilnewriting.wordpress.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LizMilneLtd/

To order a copy of the chapbook, go to: Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press.