Ellen Klages: Passing Strange

[bibliogramma]

Ellen Klages' novella, Passing Strange, is a rich science fantasy that explores many transitions - passings - across diverse borders. The narrative begins with an account of the final days of Helen Young, an American woman of Japanese heritage who has spent much of her life passing in one way or another. When we met her, she is very old, dying of some unspecified condition. One of her last acts before her self-administered final passing is to sell an original drawing - the last drawing - of the highly collectible pulp artist known as Haskel.

The narrative then moves back in time to the early days of the second world war, to San Francisco's hidden gay world. Here again Helen is passing, in multiple ways. As a straight woman - she is married, to a gay Asian man - and as Chinese - her married name in ambiguous and as she herself notes, most white people can't tell Asians if different nationalities apart. She is also a lawyer, but 'passes' as an exotic dancer to make ends meet. And she models Asian characters, male and female, for Haskell's covers.

Haskell is, like Helen, a lesbian, and passing professionally as a man to sell their art. As the story progresses, she meets and falls in love with Emily, a young butch and drag king performer who sings at the local lesbian bar.

Klages writes with great detail and empathy about the lives of lesbians in pre-war San Francisco, the different experiences of those, usually femmes like Helen and Haskell, who can pass, and the butches and dykes who cannot pass and thus draw the most reaction from the straight world of police and gawking voyeuristic tourists. The fears of discovery and subsequent loss, the courage to go on in spite of all this.

There's another dimension of passing in the story, besides that of the boundaries of gender. There are also passages across the borders of science and magic, reality and illusion. We meet Franny, a witch of sorts, with the gift of translocation, of passing magically between geographically separated points by folding the maps she creates, and her partner Babs, a mathematics professor who is trying to develop a branch of topological math that can describe what Franny does. And Polly, a young relative of Franny's from England whose passion is science, which she uses to help develop acts for her magician-father. And eventually, we learn the story of Haskell's grandmother, who used magic to pass through danger by turning life into art, and then back into life.

The story of Emily and Haskell's romance is both sweet, and fraught with danger because of their transgressive sexuality, and ultimately they must make use of Haskell's family magic to escape when there is no other way, a strange and magical passage into another life.

Klages fills her narrative with borders, boundaries, crossings, passages and transformations, from the great passings of life and death to the small changes in colour and appearance brought about by different lighting. What remains the same, despite transformations, is loyalty, friendship, and love.

If there is any weakness to this story, it's that there's not enough. The principal characters are drawn with such clarity and depth that one wants to know so much more about all of them, their lives after this moment in time. I had an overwhelming feeling that each woman mentioned has a marvellous story waiting to be told, about how they came to be in this place and time, and where they went from there. And I want those stories.