Review
Ocean Sketchbook: Short Stories and Songs from the Far Shore
2019
Spanking Pulp Press
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #15 (April 2019).
So it turns out Alasdair McLeod is a teacher in a nearby international school, which is something I discovered when they hosted a football tournament. I even had a copy of Ocean Sketchbook on my iPhone – some nice synchronicity there, to kick things off.
Before beginning this collection I was aware that McLeod had a predilection for the speculative in his fiction. Three of the five short stories here could be described thus, especially ‘Code Tide Rising – the Library of Code’ which is outright science fictional in its AI premise. The remainder are set in Asia; Thailand’s realm of the Nagas features in ‘When the Gods Make Merit’, and ‘Tomorrow’s Light’ is a similarly-located potent mix of psychic connection between brothers, augmented by some extraordinarily powerful and unusual tattoos.
But Ocean Sketchbook is more diverse than just short stories. The centrepiece of the collection is the long travelogue of the same name, in which our intrepid narrator crews a yacht nearly 6,000 miles across the Atlantic from England to Spain to the Bahamas. Also here is the haunting ‘The Woman in the Suicide Forest’ about an encounter in the Mount Fuji location (Aokigahara) where people actually do go to kill themselves.
The third part to the collection is a long section of McLeod’s poetry, most of it in a planetary/
cosmological vein as opposed to a speculative one (the notable exception being ‘When I Am Downloadable’). In his poetry McLeod also exhibits a strong leaning to the romantic.
Diversity in subject/genre is the abiding strength of Ocean Sketchbook, and it would be very interesting to see further collections, particularly of his short fiction.
