The Land of Look Behind hopes to be something of a rear-view mirror, at
once cocked to reveal our innermost dimensions while transporting that,
which by necessity, must lie beyond. Involving ourselves in any
interplay with flickering images, of course, must be more than fireside
watching and it is my hope the book will be seen not solely as a
collection of short stories, although these do figure prominently in
the narrative. Satire, "beast fables," and texts (single-page entries)
mingle casually with the longer tales. Regardless of the genre, they
hope to speak as a unit--to view the conflicting colours of a prism's
radiation. Allow me to detail what you can expect.
On the subject of Indian myths, these are entirely of my own making.
They are an attempt to visualize the mysteries of creation through
alien perspectives. Oral myths were Canada's indigenous literature. In
this vein, the writer resorts to utilizing the spoken ballad form in
some of his exercises. Some of the prose pieces reflect a mirror world
where the gazer chances upon reality with a new breath of
perception--much as the native people's world was to the arrival of the
whites. Bewilderment with the natural world is the keynote here. For
how many of us have wished, like the Indian, to clarify a particularly
taxing bit of life--to elucidate its function into a more recognizable
form?
On a larger plane, this is the issue before the book--the "terrible
algebra of our existences,"--explored with the urgency and sometime
seriousness it deserves.
The Land of Look Behind
By Paul Cameron Brown