Light Boxes by Shane Jones

“I wanted to write you a story about magic. I wanted rabbits appearing from hats. I wanted balloons lifting you into the sky. It turned out to be nothing but sadness, war, heartbreak. You never saw it, but there’s a garden inside me.” Spoken by February, Light Boxes, Shane Jones (2009).

I might very well begin by issuing a word of advice to those reading: go and find yourself a copy of Light Boxes by Shane Jones. It’s a novel as much as it is a window into another world, full of complexities, delightful to behold – it’s difficult to believe it is Jones’ first novel. Light Boxes is a story of a town tormented by the season ‘February’, who also happens to be a person living in the clouds. The townspeople are driven into despair by the endless cold and the disappearance and murder of many in the community, especially children. The people of this ‘town’ of Jones’ creation revel in the glory of flight—spending endless spring days flying kites and balloons in skies with the birds. February, however, bans all flight, extinguishing the hope and spirit of the book’s characters. 

This is where the author places you – in the throes of February’s cruelty, along with the townsfolk, over 300 days after February begun. Initially, the reader doesn’t get the sense of an omnipotent narrator; the chapters lead in with headings of the character in focus – written almost as diary entries. The details can seem misleadingly ‘cute’ or ‘neat’, with descriptions of the mint soup they must drink to ward off February, for example, or the cold air smelling of apples (Jones, p46). These descriptions, though highly prevalent throughout the first half of the novel, fade slowly into more a sinister, cold detachment … at which point, I might add, the reader becomes aware of omnipotent narration. 

At this stage, a font change between ‘worlds’ becomes evident on the pages and the interplay between written/imagined and reality begin to dissever. There develops a delectable incongruity between aspects of the story – mostly resulting in abrupt contrast, playing off binary means of description: honey/smoke; teeth/snow; cold/hot; dream/reality. Jones makes the reader aware of the multiplicity of storytelling without alienating them from the characters. It becomes problematic – this linking of reality into the fanciful – the stability of the world in the book is shaken, albeit the story in no way suffers. On the contrary, the reader is only taken in further into a world of wonder in which Jones exemplifies the power of writing as escapism and proves how thin the veil is between ‘created’ and ‘real’. 

By Dana Lawrie