I was present at the birth of both my children. To bastardize R.E.M., it was the end of my world as I knew it. Both children arrived via C-section. More than two decades later, my wife still complains that I gave her no support through the deliveries because I was so mesmerized by the surgery. My son’s arrival was the goriest thing I’d ever seen. How could I turn away? It was not until I had witnessed the birthing process that I understood the close association between birth and death. Nor do I wonder now at the modern conflation of meanings associated with the word apocalypse: it is both a revelation and an ultimate destruction.
Birth and revelation, death and ultimate destruction. These have been bred into the DNA of Matt Bell’s slender collection, Cataclysm Baby, twenty-six delicious tales (one for each letter of the alphabet) about fathers and the more-often-than-not grotesque children they bring into a dying world. There are children covered in fur, and others, in mounds of fatty flesh. Some possess a canny clairvoyance while others forage like simians through the overhead trees. And one, the daughter of the “Y” chapter, comes into the world as a “puff of womb-air, this gasp of baby-breath.” But the fathers of these dystopian scenarios haven’t time for coddling nor the resources to buy things from Toys R Us. The demands of mere survival turn them into cold and sometimes brutal caregivers. They give away their children for the hope of a chance of a better life. They hurl children from a cliff when they can no longer hide the deformities. And, in a nasty twist on The Most Dangerous Game, a father gives his son fifty yards before he opens fire.
Bell draws on Biblical/mythical sources and contemporary dystopian writing in equal measure. This is no surprise given his epigraphs, quotes from both the Genesis flood story and Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic odyssey. We peel away the layers of Bell’s tales and find traces of the encounter between Abraham and Isaac. In “Justina, Justine, Justise” we meet three blind sisters, “my three little furies, my three furious daughters” who punish their father for his infidelity. Other stories evoke P.D. James’ Children of Men. In “Greyson, Griffin, Guillermo” the father laments his randy red-headed sons, his “one-note issue”, who impregnate all the women in the village but can breed only boys. With a sometime preoccupation with floods and a penchant for ritual and liturgical language, several of the stories suggest Margaret Atwood’s latest novels. We see this most clearly in “Quella, Quirida, Quintessa” with an Untethering ceremony where the parents release the cable from their daughter’s ankle and allow her to float away.
While it seems natural to read these tales as allegories of parenthood—cue R.E.M.—nevertheless I can’t help but give them a literal gloss. The horror of these tales is that, in some places within our wretched world, parents do give up their children for the hope of a chance of a better life. And with recent revisions to climate change forecasts, we may be well on our way to a world from Bell’s pages.
If I were to offer Cataclysm Baby like a wine pairing, I would recommend it as, say, a full-bodied merlot, dark, but with a smooth finish, well-suited to accompany a meal of Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted On The Voyage and a plate of Year of the Flood on the side.
Read my review of Matt Bell’s previous short story collection, How They Were Found.