Steiner, Robert - Dreamtime
(06 November 07)Dreamtime Stories
Robert F. Steiner Dreamtime: A Collection of Short Stories (iUniverse Star, 2007)
A review by Greg Spearritt.
(Reviewed November 2007)
In general, short stories aren’t my thing: I’d much rather sustain the pleasure of a great story over several days (as I did recently, in exquisite fashion, with The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger). Nor is the supernatural a subject I have much interest in these days. On the face of it, then, Dreamtime is not my kind of book.
I did surprise myself, a little, by enjoying a number of Steiner’s stories. All but one in this collection feature the inexplicable, the supernatural, the ‘spooky’. My favourite – ‘The Decoy’ – was the exception, though it had other bizarre elements to give it spice.
These are stories of figures from the past sojourning in our present, dreams and visions with uncanny connections to the ‘real’ world, unusual people with special powers intruding on normality.
I have nothing against the transcendent and the spooky as subjects for literature. But the “altered point of view” that the back cover of Dreamtime says Steiner offers us is all too prevalent, as I see it, outside the world of fiction. There are far too many people willing to believe in magic, from crystals to miracles to uncanny events pregnant with transcendent, if not supernatural, significance. In literature – ‘sacred’ texts aside – this is generally given its proper name: fantasy.
What we need, in my view, is that “altered point of view” which sees the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary, as miraculous and potentially laden with meaning. And that’s what you find in some short stories of an entirely different kind. In collections like Dream Stuff and Every Move You Make, David Malouf makes the natural world as it intersects with the human world the locus of extraordinary significance. Here is grounding, connection, spirituality… without the crudity of magic.
