This Water: Five Tales by Melbourne author Beverley Farmer (b. 1941), is a collection of three novellas and two short stories, linked by exquisite images of water and harrowing musings on loss, reminiscent of Farmer’s preoccupations in a previous collection called A Body of Water (see my review). But age mellows this collection, and the elemental forms of water and stone, ice and fire, light and darkness give the writing a mythic quality. Yes, in the wake of my reading of Contemporary Fiction, A Very Short Introduction, I am mindful that this collection of tales shows that fiction can indeed take any form it likes.

The stories which bookend the work were the most vivid to me. The last story, ‘The Ice Bride’ is chilling not because the bride lives in a palace of ice, but because she is imprisoned there, sheltered from the real world and learning only to see the world as her husband desires. As the fairy tale progresses, the reader recognises the horror of the prison before she does, and the tension mounts as love and paternalistic affection is withdrawn when she unwittingly transgresses. Like Eve, the Ice Bride wants to know and understand more, while he wants only to shape her in his own image of perfection.

He first came into being for her when he appeared and took her in his arms. She spoke her first ever words: What are you?

He kissed her. I am the Master of Snow and Ice, he said, and you are my bride, my masterpiece, a paragon of bridehood in the making. I have much to reveal to you now that we are married. The vows, the rules I have bound you with, our mutual duties, are those of fidelity, patience, honesty, devotion, trust. In the fullness of time you will also know by heart the bonds of silence, absence and solitude.

I see, she said, and he smiled, knowing better, and kissed her again. Have no fear. It will come more easily as you are perfected. (p.196)

I bet there’s not a woman reading this who isn’t repelled by this declaration that he will master her. The palace is not like those dingy cellars we have seen in the media, places that men have used to lock women away for decades for their own warped pleasure; shimmering and glittering in its icy spaces, the palace resonates more like the Beast’s castle with a labyrinth of winding paths and locked doors. But this is a fairy tale without a happy ending. The gold ring he places on her finger is an everlasting presence that weighs on her and she is like the bee she finds trapped in a prison of amber in his room of precious stones…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/08/06/this-water-five-tales-by-beverley-farmer/ ( )