5 out of 5

This story is dreadful.  …In that it makes you feel, against your will, so deeply for both of its leads, who are such different creatures, and maybe not like your or me, but are these incredibly nuanced proxies for the human condition…

Brad Felver has concocted a short tale about love and loss that uses elements we’ve absolutely read elsewhere – a dead child, a crumbled relationship – and turned them into something so real and brittle, you’re certain the next sentence will sink into the melodrama or cliche these stories often use to coast into emotions, but he maintains the balance.  It is that mystical writing style where the characters and actions speak louder than the writer, and yet, post reading, you know a deft hand must be behind the work when considering the carefully applied wording, and symbols, most notably the eponymous Queen Elizabeth tree, which our lead couple cannot fit their arms around, even when joined together.  Nodding references like this – wink wink, guys, it’s the title of the story – can offset a narrative with their obviousness, but the concept is tastefully dotted into the text, and ends up informing the travels in a major way.

Gus – carpenter, lives on a farm – and Ruth – mathematician, lives in a mansion – are as different as ever but come together at just the right time and in the right way to fall deeply in love.  And out of it, or at least out of their marriage.  We read about the beginning, the middle, and then an ending, some twenty years later.

What’s important about Felver’s structure is how he never sides us, opinion-wise or POV-wise, too squarely with Gus or Ruth, nor is the story traditionally split between them.  The narrator does tend to sit on one of their shoulders for a few pages at a time, but the words still sort of float between the two, selling their unity and underlining the gut punch of their drifting apart.

And I do mean gut punch.  I literally had to stop reading and put the One Story pamphlet down at one point, when Ruth has a detail mix-up in her head.  When she realizes her error, I realized I’d read her error in the way she thought it (…in the way Felver wrote it), meaning I was just as caught out by the moment.  I was completely within Ruth’s world, all within a few pages.

While I realize the world has its share of spiteful and manipulative people, books that hang on these behaviors to fuel their machinations tend to feel lacking to me, not addressing the human behind those actions.  Neither Gus or Ruth is particularly either one of those things, though the both – through action or inaction – prove capable of hurting their partners.  But by completely humanizing these characters, we sense the gears beneath, churning inherent fears and self-judgments, which trigger these outward behaviors.  The perceived impact of these actions is then that much greater.

As is the importance of all the little moments strung throughout Felver’s story.

Queen Elizabeth doesn’t allow for a clean emotional getaway.  Felver is a horrible man for writing something so good, and that so naturally allows us to witness the events as they unfold.