Even the Queen

Subtle comedy, blatant slapstick and psychological horror

• Even the Queen
• By Connie Willis
• Wyrmhole Publishing Ltd.
• Audiotape, 180 minutes
• $17.95/$23.95 Canada

onnie Willis' short stories always seem to be, on a stylistic level, about order coming out of chaos. The harried characters in her futuristic, screwball comedies may or may not ever see that emerging order, but it's always there for the readers, who get their payoff at the carefully-delayed moment when the smoke finally clears and it becomes possible to see what the story's actually about.

This pattern holds true for all five stories on Even the Queen, an audio anthology written and read by Willis herself. Three of the offerings are subtle comedy, one is blatant slapstick, and one is creepy psychological horror, but they all follow the characteristic Willis pattern of conceal-and-reveal. And they all consist in large part of heaps of non sequiturs, one-liners and irrelevancies piled up with cleverly feigned carelessness into a big sloppy haystack. Reading them is a game -- will the reader find the needle in that haystack before Willis whips it out and pokes them with it?

The nature of the needle ranges widely from story to story. Sometimes it's an actual punch line, sometimes just a concept or epiphany Willis has been sneakily hinting at for 15 minutes. But whether it's the exact nature of the cult in Even the Queen or the Unified Field Theory linking the widely disparate elements in At the Rialto or Close Encounters, there's always a surprise hidden somewhere in the text.

The problem with this two-tape set is that those surprises are less accessible than they were in print. Willis' style doesn't lend itself well to audio, which imposes a strict, set pacing on her extremely pacing-dependent comedy. At the slow speed necessary for a clear reading, faster readers will find the redundancies more obvious -- even occasionally grating, which they rarely are on the page. More deliberate readers, by contrast, will find themselves missing some of the subtleties and asides Willis casually tosses at them. In some cases, both problems interfere with the same story.

While fixed pacing is a problem with any reading, but the joy of Willis' stories is tied to individual discovery rates, which get utterly lost in this format. And much of her style rests on comedically frequent reiteration, which, in print, is much easier to gloss over once the reader's gotten the point and is ready to tear ahead to the next epiphany. Both are indispensable for these stories, and both are seriously hampered by the medium.

Granted, any effort to make Willis' uncollected work available is laudable. And these stories are so cleverly conceived and beautifully crafted that it's hard to remember it gets better than this. But fans who enjoy this collection would probably be happiest using it as a stepping-stone to print collections. At least until Doomsday Book comes out on audio.

Coincidentally, I finally got my hands on the "Fire Watch" collection last week. If you haven't read "All My Darling Daughters" yet, you just don't know what a fantastic writer Connie Willis really is. -- Tasha

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