Rachel Anderson’s The Bus People

Anderson, Rachel.  The Bus People.  1989.  New York: Henry Holt, 1992.

Originally published in the UK, this book is a set of interconnected stories–a form of alternating narrative I haven’t looked at closely before.  in this case, they really aren’t all that interconnected.  The central characters in each of the stories are children who ride a bus to a special school for children with various mental and physical deficiencies, and there are sections at the beginning and the end which focus on the driver of the bus and his view of his passengers.   But by virtue of their various problems, and also, clearly, by the choice of the author, the characters have very little in the way of contact with each other.  They just about never think about each other or even seem to be all that aware of each other, and the stories about them are not about what happens on the bus but about other moments and experiences in their lives away from each other  So what is connected for readers–a set of insights into the diverse situations of what is actually, for all their problems, a fairly diverse set of characters, is not really connected at all for the characters themselves.  Even at the end, which makes a halfhearted attempted at a conventional children’s literature happy ending by having a flat tire on the bus result in the children getting off and playing in a group together, is hardly a representation of a movement from isolation to a community: the children all play at the same time, but not necessarily with, or even with very much awareness of, each other

Perhaps that’s a deliberate irony here: as a result of their problems, these characters are isolated, imprisoned inside themselves–and indeed that’s the central theme running through all the stories, whether as a perception of another character in the story or as the central concern of a character him or herself.  I have to say that I’m not totally convinced that actual people in these circumstances are so obsessively centred on their own isolation from everyone else.  They, after all, often do not have the other experience of “normal” connectivity to compare their own situation with; they don’t necessarily know how relatively isolated they are in relation to the experiences of other people.  But the author, identified on the jacket flap as “herself the mother of a mentally handicapped child,” has a clear conviction that conditions like these are most inherently and importantly isolating, for it’s an idea that comes back again and again, as well as being the central sense that emerges from the lack of connection between the theoretically connected stories.  they actually represent a set of variations on themes of misunderstanding and isolation.

For instance, the first story is about a mentally handicapped girl all set to be her sister’s bridesmaid, until some nasty interfering aunts say it will be embarrassing–and everyone in her family, astonishingly, agrees.  (I can accept the aunts’ annoyance as a possible thing, but I’m astonished that a family so ready to allow the girl to be a bridesmaid that she has the dress and all would suddenly cave in and hurt her at the last minute–it just isn’t logical, and it seems to happen only to make a luridly melodramatic point about how thoughtless people are.)  The story then twists the knife by allowing this mentally challenged person to have a clear, subtle, and accurate perception of everything that’s happening and what it all means not only emotionally but ethically.  It’s as if she were a Henry James unable to communicate and so doomed to be misunderstood and underestimated–and not just cut off from others, but tragically isolated in the prison of her own very profound understandings of what she sees and others refuse to acknowledge.  Indeed, many of the other characters are similarly isolated in a similarly rich understanding of their own situations that those around them are ignorant of and prefer, clearly, not to know about.  It’s as if the author cannot imagine, or simply refuses to imagine, that other people might understand their situation differently from the way she does.  One section begins, “If Fleur spoke, this is the story she might tell,” and the story that follows once more gives her a very clear understanding of herself as an empathetic outsider with a more usual understanding of psychology and morality might see her.  The actual otherly-abled child has been replaced by what I have to understand as a wish-filfulment fantasy of her as inherently understanding and wise–and therefore,  in a situation doubly ugly, for not only is she mentally deficient and damaged, but she is perfectly able to understand her own situation and insightful about it and so, imprisoned not only by lack of understanding but by a horrific possession of understanding also.   These are, I have to say, really creepy stories, in ways I’m fairly sure the author didn’t intend to be creepy.  they amount to horror stories

Not only are the characters mostly unaware of each other, but the stories that feature them as central characters represent a wide variety of narrative techniques.  At the start, Bertraim is in the present tense in a story told by a third person narrator, and at the end, the narration is in the past tense.  in between, some stories are in the present, some in the past, some in the third person, some told by a first person narrator’s point of view.  The sense of a random variety of different effects once more emphasizes the distinctness of these stories from each other, the insufficiency of the attempt to suggest community or connections between desperately isolated and imprisoned people.