The Ambassador of What
Adrian Michael Kelly
ECW Press, 2018
Review by Jessica Torrens
The Ambassador of What takes tough fathers and striving sons to a whole new level. Akin to his debut novel Down Sterling Road, in this short story collection Kelly shows us the outer edge of small-town Ontario in the late 70s and early 80s in all its low-tech glory of patched antennas and jumped hydro wires. He then layers this with close-in scenes of people trapped in interactions in cars, trains and on planes. The crowning layer is how Kelly captures the rhythm of Scots English, the abbreviated, quick-turn speech of family, and the “appalling seconds” evoked in full agony.
Part 1 draws us into a complex series of stories with a gritty Scots father, who works part-time on the ambulance and part-time painting houses, and his university-bound son—a head-on family of two. The father variously puts his son through feats of physical endurance, read suffering, while son tools himself to match his father in cadence and resilience if not, ultimately, in lifestyle.
The first story opens with an eleven-year-old who wakes with a fetid tooth, but resists going to stuff it with aspirin for fear of disturbing his father. And yet, it is the boy who offers his father breakfast.
Tea?
Aye.
Cream of Wheat?
Eggs, how bout?
Hard or soft?
Soft, mine.
Soldiers too?
When the son suggests waiting out the rain to unload the car, his father retorts: “Made of sugar?” As a reader, we’re immediately involved in this world of egg shells and front-clipped phrases. It is abrupt, yet intimate. A world built around a close knowing of what sets another person off and the dread that you’ll never avoid it completely. “Stragglers” skillfully leads us through laxatives and a drive to the Big Smoke to reveal the morning of the boy’s first marathon. Kelly evokes both the agony and the comradery of those unwanted miles, and commits the reader to the boy’s journey.
After escaping his father by taking a summer job in Calgary, in “Dog Shit Blues” the son returns from university to rescue him after a series of two-word calls and hang-ups.
Son.
Yes.
Your Nana.
I know, Dad.
It becomes clear who has been holding the family together since grade school.
This section of the book is powerfully framed with “MacInney’s Strong”. In an elegant twist, ambulance work and painting come together as the father is appreciated for holding grief and rebuilding the lives of a couple after an accident. He’s helped them turn a diner into a place of fine-dining and, to express their gratitude, they treat father and son to an intimate five-course meal. In the car home, they connect over Modern Scottish Poetry and we feel father and son actually have shared a fair few miles together.
While each story has a complete story arc of its own, there is a very satisfying larger trajectory that spans fifteen years or more in the larger first section. The stories are small windows in time and yet, we’re taken convincingly, devastatingly, from coming-of-age to early middle age. Part 2 offers one long separate story in the same vein about a fishing trip gone wrong, as well as several smaller pieces. “Mid-flight” is almost purely dialogue between two passengers—it highlights Kelly’s fine tooled voice and character-driven prose. The final entry, “Animal Cruelty”, reads like flash fiction at two pages and does not quite fit with the theme of the volume. In spite of the genius of “Mid-flight”, a slightly expanded first section could justifiably have taken over the whole book. The early characters wheedle themselves into our consciousness, like family, their identities forever fossilized in lines of relation, nameless though they remain.
Jessica Torrens is an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia. She teaches and writes articles on yoga philosophy and holistic living for Akhanda Yoga. Her fiction, CNF and poetry writing centre around the sacred within both ordinary and extraordinary moments. She is currently working on a novel set in South Korea. www.HoldingTheInvisibleString.com