Book Review - The Fate of Mice

by Susan Palwick. Tachyon Publications, 2007.

“Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.” - Luke 14:21.

Susan Palwick’s protagonists are, almost invariably, the least, the last, and the lost: abused children (Flying in Place), refugees (The Necessary Beggar), orphans, the homeless and the stigmatized (Shelter). The stories in The Fate of Mice are no exception. Here we meet the deranged, a prostitute, other marginalized women, and a few more orphans. Even the more far-fetched characters exist on the edges of society: a laboratory mouse, a werewolf kept on a leash, the reanimated dead, and a girl whose aching heart is on the outside of her body.

The stories in this collection range from those with only barely discernible speculative elements to fairy tales and science fictional fables like “Sorrel’s Heart” or “The Old World.” In the latter humanity experiences a moral revolution, with nearly everybody becoming kinder and more responsible. This eucatastrophe makes the world a much better place, but creates unexpected problems for paranoid conspiracy theorists. On the other hand, “Elephant” is something like a Margaret Atwood story with a magic realist twist. In it, a woman who’s had a miserable life literally conceives a desperate hope that things might change.

A number of the stories use fairy tale trappings to make subtle points about injustices done to women, like the devastating werewolf story “Gestella.” In “Stormdusk” a girl discovers her long-suffering mother’s arcane origins. “Ever After” (one of my favourites) both teases out the female desperation implicit in traditional fairy godmother tales and then takes that imagery to an unexpectedly chilling conclusion. Indeed, a number of the stories in The Fate of Mice are fairly dark.

But this is not to say they are without hope. One of the dangers of spending time on the margins is that you just might meet God there. While reading The Fate of Mice, I found myself reminded of this prayer from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun: “Obscure Outsider, be not angry with us, though we have never sufficiently honoured you. All that is outcast, discarded and despised is yours.” Most of the tales in the collection have no obvious religious elements, but the final, powerful story casts a long shadow back over the rest, hinting that God might be lurking there in the gutters and back alleys. This story, “GI Jesus,” reminded me of Flannery O’Connor (that’s high praise indeed) with its down-and-out characters and its incognito secret agent, Jesus Christ.

As with any collection, some stories were more interesting than others. I didn’t particularly care for “Jo’s Hair,” though that could be chalked up to my lack of interest in Little Women. “Beautiful Stuff” had a wonderful premise, but seemed a bit rough, like it needed another revision. All in all, though, Palwick’s stories were well-told and emotionally moving. The Fate of Mice packs a powerful punch.

4 out of 5