One of my favorite short stories from Aimee Bender’s The Color Master is “The Devourings,” not because of its strong fantastical setting (don’t get me wrong: that certainly played a part), but because the story showcases Bender’s knowledge and love for the fairy tale structure. The story, which centers on the wife of a man-eating ogre, approaches the idea of how to deal with grief. But this theme is disguised as a lesson in a fairy tale, all the way to the rather odd ending.
Everything, from Bender’s word choice and sentence structure to her descriptions of the ogres and humans, builds to the story’s strengths as a fairy tale. And that sense of importance, even buried beneath a magical world where human women can have children with ogres, reminds me strongly of the central idea of magical realism: To explore issues of the real world that might not be comfortable to talk about in a normal setting and dress them up as mystical to make it easier to broach the subject. Bender is a master of this, especially in The Color Master. I found the most apparent example in “The Devourings,” which presents all five stages of grief told through the fairy tale narrator.
Bender’s ability to fuse a fairy tale with very real ideas is useful in the modern world. Grief, while universal, is never an easy topic to discuss, and it’s presented that way from the beginning of the story. When the ogre eats his children by mistake, I felt a very real, very solid weight in my gut, even though the fairy tale aspect is still present and telling me that this is just a story. The fairy tale structure makes me feel slightly removed from the central characters, but somehow the story still stirs some strong feelings.
The fact that those little children switched places with the ogre children to throw off the ogre’s scent is familiar in its taste of the whimsical yet dark nature of the Brothers Grimm. But everything that follows is a consequence of the characters’ previous actions, a realistic portrayal of what it means to struggle with grief.
The ending is perhaps the most intriguing. The portrayal of this grief and how the characters deal with it extends beyond every character’s lifespan, and that is the most interesting occurrence of the entire short story collection, in that I couldn’t put my finger on why the story would end this way: years after the central characters have passed out of the story, the magical cake and cloak remain.
But after I thought about it for a while, I saw the connection between this story and the real world: trauma often extends beyond one lifetime and can affect people across many generations. The loneliness of the cake continued long after the characters who were affected by the tragedy had not only moved on, but passed on. But in its perpetual feeding of the cloak, its constantly shifting balance of light and darkness, the grief manages to find resolution even after all that time has passed. The story’s message is not as hopeless as it might seem at first. Trauma and grief can extend past one’s generation, yes, but it can also be resolved after so much time has passed.
This fusion of structure and style presents an interesting aspect of the writing craft: The knowledge of the structure of a specific story and the ability to use this structure to fit one’s tale can create something completely new, yet inexplicably familiar.
Rachel Sandell 