The Migration of Ghosts
by Pauline Melville
An appreciation
Readers will greet TThe Migration of Ghosts' twelve mischievous and richly told tales of spirits—high spirits, the spirits of the dead, and a few shots of distilled spirits to boot—with the same sense of refreshing discovery that led Salman Rushdie to call author Pauline Melville "one of the few genuinely original writers to emerge in recent years."
Setting the stories of The Migration of Ghosts both in Europe and Latin America, Melville—who is the daughter of a British mother and a Guyanese father—crafts bracing vignettes and robustly drawn characters that speak directly to a reader's senses while deftly drawing on a wide range of literary influences, and letting them migrate across eras and cultures to dizzying effect.
The lead-off story, "The President's Exile," is graced with a haunting touch of magic realism, as a recently dead South American politician revisits scenes from his ruthless rise to power. Then, in the following story, mundane English reality is touched with giddy South American magic. "Mrs. Da Silva's Carnival" finds a 65-year-old London widow swept up in a street fair tribute to the rainforest: "...a council education officer disguised as a treefrog is standing next to the truck listening to his hand-held radio...Mrs. da Silva begins to concentrate on allowing the tingaling pangalang of the music to enter her bones."
Another older woman is revived by music in "The Duende," in which a contemporary Spanish village is rendered timeless through Melville's almost folkloric rendering of the story. As Dona Rosita dances herself out of despair, the specter of death and the passion of flamenco easily override the Coca-Cola logos and "mounds of T-shirts" at the marketplace. This notion of deep, culture-bound tradition superceding characters' physical environments is touched upon again in the title story, in which a Brazilian Indian brings her native sense of fatalism along on a trip to post-Communist Eastern Europe.
In "The Parrot and Descartes," one of the collection's formally boldest—and funniest—pieces, a curious Venezuelan bird is imported to the continent by an English courtier and becomes the feathered Forrest Gump of 17th Century Europe, encountering the likes of Shakespeare, Rembrandt and the titular philosopher. None of these experiences prove particularly useful when our avian hero returns to live in the jungle.
Amidst her learned command of literary traditions, Melville is unafraid of self-deprecating humor and never ceases to appreciate the raw scents and melancholy textures of workaday life. In "Don't Give Me Your Sad Stories," struggling steeplejack Jimmy McCleod rushes to drown his sorrows at a pub: "From Luigi's bakery, the smell of Monday's fresh bread is already hitting the street, reminding him that he hasn't eaten. Whiskey will cure his appetite." At the bar, Jimmy and his friend Dave meet a rather self-absorbed BBC scriptwriter, to whom Dave remarks, "I've noticed something in life...You can pretend to be a writer. But you can't pretend to be a steeplejack."
It is Pauline Melville's very lack of of self-absorption and pretense allows her to craft such believable characters from all strata of society, and to bring so many cultures to bear on a collection that nonetheless reads with remarkable fluidity. Simultaneously clever and open-hearted, every story in The Migration of Ghosts finds Pauline Melville turning her own spiritual and intellectual travels into work that will not quickly migrate from delighted readers' memories.
