[Calque Press; 2024]
There’s a pleasant form of whiplash in reading a well-crafted collection of speculative short fiction. This is particularly true for a collection like Marian Womack’s Lost Objects, which runs the gamut of speculative possibilities, eluding all possible categorization except for maybe eco-fiction and Womack’s self-described area of interest, the Weird. In an interview with Yale Climate Connections, Womack described the vantage point of Weird fiction as “a view of the world in which humankind is seen as very small, very vulnerable, and at the same time arrogant in its pretensions.” Lost Objects shows us humanity at its most atomized, out of control, hoping and fearing and going mad. Womack is a master at using realism to enhance the uncanny. She gives familiar settings: the Sagrada Familia, an academic library, a living room, the raw-edged uncertainty of outer space. The collection is divided into two sections, the first of which deals with worlds made unrecognizable by degeneration and strange new forms of generation and brought to life by their effects on human consciousness. In part II, Womack brings the uncanny home, constructing subtle dystopias whose power lies in their familiarity.
The new edition includes a succinct introduction by Priya Sharma, another British writer of genre-defying fiction. Sharma recalls first hearing Womack’s name in Madrid bookstore Desperate Literature and draws a connection between the unsettling futures imagined in Womack’s work and a Roberto Bolaño quote that is the namesake of said bookstore, highlighting the necessity of books like Lost Objects in times of desperation brought on by political and ecological collapse.
One of the collection’s most captivating worlds is “The Ravisher, The Thief,” a story in which La Basílica de la Sagrada Familia is transformed into a temple of holy raptors that fly among its tree-like pillars, its stained glass replaced by wood. The narrator, named Paloma after the Latin word for dove, surmises that “the builders had got it right: for a forest, of any kind, was the most sacred place on Earth, as it gave protection to all creatures.”
Besides the obvious coolness of the image of the Sagrada Familia as a Temple of Raptors, the idea that centuries in the future, all that will remain of Gaudi’s vision is his intention to depict the forest as a cathedral, is highly suggestive. Birds appear as objects of reverence in two different stories, also acting as intermediaries between the weird and the real. Others, like “Black Isle” and “Orange Dogs,” portray animals as objects of human manipulation. These diverge from the bird stories—“The Ravisher, The Thief” and “Kingfisher”—in that their creatures are transformed in bizarre ways by science and rapid environmental change. In both stories, the animals wreak havoc on scientists who engineer and study them, representing the limits of human ingenuity to contain and the natural world. It’s no revelation that humans tend to possess a fascination with animals that manifests doubly as violent possessiveness and affection bordering on worship. What Womack suggests through the weave of these stories is that this dichotomy lies at the heart of environmental destruction, and that it will only become more extreme as we reckon with its effects.
Womack’s most haunting stories are those that skewer lives resembling our own with disorienting loss and absence. Take “Kingfisher,” in which a writer stuck in place is overcome by images of her husband transforming into a bird, and her desire to see a kingfisher. The juxtaposition of personal and environmental conflict winds through the rhythms of the prose, giving it a certain lightness and vivacity:
On the blue, shiny sea, a prevalent Sun descended, turning the sky an ominous purple. Soon all that could be seen were little candles, flickering here and there, lost at the far end of the ocean. After the procession was over, we went back to the apartment we were renting and had a fight about our ancient grievances. The next morning we woke up to the news a fisherman had killed his family during the night.
This swift descent from a beautiful image of environmental ritual into human pettiness and finally into violence illuminates a crucial aesthetic tenet of Lost Objects: under conditions of environmental degradation, there is no such thing as “natural beauty.” There are man-made illusions and scenes tainted by human arrogance.
Sharma posits that Womack’s work is powerful because it’s “underpinned by small details of domestic life described in beautiful prose.” This is undoubtedly true, especially in the book’s second section, but Womack’s more outlandish worldbuilding is at least as rich in detail and pathos as her more grounded stories. “Marvels Do Not Oftimes Occur,” the last story in section I, is a bright, fast-burning snapshot with a simply astonishing intricacy of detail. It is also perhaps the most formally interesting of the collection, written as an official testimony to the arrival of dancing ships in the sky that emit beams of light and heat, setting fire to cathedrals in a central European town on April 14, 1561. We learn the names of townspeople who died, the hues and movements of the vessels, the church that burned first and for how long. It is a divine punishment in the form of an environmental disaster, anachronistic to our understanding of when and why environmental disasters take place, but written in the same regretful style of documentation that trails any large-scale tragedy.
Section II ends with “A Place For Wild Beasts,” another cold-plunge vignette and one of the most affecting pieces of flash fiction I’ve read in years. It captures the responses of a woman who discovers a deer has been eating her flowers, and that maybe they are not her flowers after all. In a way, an intrusion into the garden, true nature foisting itself upon man-made nature, is the perfect conclusion to Womack’s project. Over and over, we are made to understand that there is no place for human ownership in the present tense of climate change. In a Q&A with Timothy Jarvis at the end of the new edition, Womack posits the bestowal of agency to animals as a political act, saying “I think humanity’s time has passed and we are not even aware of this.” In the end, mankind relinquishes her pretensions.
Rachel Robinson writes about books and sometimes about animals. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
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