Arms & Legs
Arms & Legs
By Chloe Lane
House of Anansi, 2024; 208 pages; $22.99
Reviewed by Gerilee McBrice
In Arms & Legs, Chloe Lane’s protagonist, Georgie, is a bit of a misfit in sheep’s clothing. She and her husband Dan, former Kiwis, have been living in Florida for almost six years and are still in a state of acclimatization — the weather and flora and fauna are powerful backdrops in which this domestic drama is reflected. The book opens upon a scene of parental panic after their toddler, Finn, has tripped and smashed his teeth on the ceramic tiles in their kitchen. Georgie isn’t home when it happens, and she points out, “It was the first time since Finn’s birth that I’d watched Dan carry the full weight of responsibility.” This set-up is a dynamic that persists throughout the first-person narrative and is the through line for which Georgie is navigating her world in this moment.
Since we only experience the story through Georgie’s perspective it does leave Dan (and other secondary characters) on the periphery. Dan, already a quiet character, doesn’t ever quite materialize in a concrete way — even when he gets an eye infection, the severity of which is diminished and ignored by Georgie, he remains out of focus. We only hear Dan in snippets of dialogue that Georgie discloses, and while he doesn’t necessarily sound whiny, he does sometimes come across as one-dimensional. It’s not Dan’s fault per se, we’re seeing his character blanketed in Georgie’s emotional resonance, which becomes especially murky when we find out about her affair with a librarian from Finn’s Music & Movement class. Central to all of these developing entanglements is Georgie’s involvement with a team whose purpose is to reduce wildfire risk by setting prescribed burns in the local forests. Her first outing with the “burners” goes very wrong when Georgie comes across a body.
The discovery of the body, one of Georgie’s former students, becomes the triggering event that pulls all of the parallel threads of her life together. Up until this point she has slowly been separating herself from Dan both emotionally and physically. She hadn’t told him about being part of the prescribed burn group. (Nor about her affair.) This is where the story really begins to tease out all of Georgie’s foibles — she is frustrated by her stagnant relationship with Dan, anxious about her son’s language skills (or lack thereof), and floundering in a way that each decision she makes, even when she can’t seem to make any choice, is the wrong one. Georgie’s internal dialogue is so well written, I never once questioned why she did a thing, but I sure cringed hard in the aftermath of the doing. Lane skillfully leads us to Georgie’s reckoning with herself and those around her. The realization doesn’t come as a thunderbolt (or as momentous as a crazed raccoon in the backyard, see chapter 10), but as simple as a quiet full-body stretch that resets the nervous system. A hypnotic read, Arms & Legs is like a placid Florida lake — teeming with the unknown, sending far-reaching ripples to the surface.