This Water: Five Tales, by Beverley Farmer

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…