The Speed Abater

    (NBM, 2003)
™ and © NBM

Blain takes one of literature’s most common storytelling methods and throws it into reverse, backing his way through a story whose introduction could have launched it in a hundred different directions. And, looking through the rear-view mirror, he tells a story that doesn’t unfold so much as regress, a story that’s brilliant in its simplicity in its own backward way.

Rather than expand on characters and situations, Blain contracts them. In his story, a sailor who’s been drafted into the French Navy dreams of high-seas adventure. But, at the beginning of his first voyage at sea and his subsequent case of seasickness, his dreams distill to seeking respite from his continual nausea. And, when this quest results in the crippling of the ship, his goals further morph into hiding and escaping a court-martial. He’s like a mechanical bull-rider who seeks to impress the bar crowd but, eight seconds later, is more than satisfied just to hang on by any means necessary.

It’s an unusual and deceptively simple approach, and the presence of other characters and an unseen enemy keep the story from predictably funneling into an overly simplified conclusion. Blain also symbolically synchronizes the damaged ship’s slowing speed to the sailor’s ebbing dreams and his descent into the ship’s bowels, giving the story’s karmic resolution a poetic exclamation point.

— Jim Johnson
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