Harry and Anna
About a third of the way through this collection of independent standalone stories arrives “A Chair for George” which introduces the married couple, Harry and Anna, and their two kids. Over the course of the next five stories, the independent standing of the story stories collapses and for the next sixty pages the reader is thrust headlong into the domestic dramas charting the course of Harry and Anna’s married life.
Dulce
The title character of the collection’s opening story presents a biographical sketch of herself which has a familiar ring to it: the tone sounds very much like the biography of the author herself. “Dulce” begins as a girl so innocent she doesn’t realize her first love rejects her because he is homosexual. She winds up a famous Canadian muse to whom every poet over the age of thirty has dedicated at least once work to. Again, much like the character’s creator.
Troy McFadden and Fidelity Munroe
“Inland Passage” is, of course, the title story of the collection, but is notably located near the end. What sets this collection apart from the bulk of Rule’s work preceding it is the abundance of heterosexual characters. Perhaps unfairly often categorized as a writer of lesbian fiction, the point of situating the tale of Troy and Fidelity meeting on a cruise ship near the end rather at the beginning where one might expect to find the title story seems to be related to idea of making this collection precisely not a collection of lesbian fiction. Troy and Fidelity that only just barely qualifies as lesbian fiction and might even, for some readers, not register as that belonging to that genre at all.
Ella Carr
Dulce ages from young innocent to legendary literary figure of a nation. Troy and Fidelity firmly set in middle age. The collection ends with the tale of Ella Carr, another famous writer who is a lioness settling in for death. The opening line informs the reader she’s in her late seventies and the last line Ella ever writes makes up the story’s closing image. With Ella trying to figure out where the pieces of the “Puzzle” that is life fit, the point of the collection comes into focus: it is a meditation on what the aging process does to the creative mind, spirit and perspective of the writer.
