Speaking metaphorically, The Museum of Possibilities strikes me as less a museum and more of a display – a portfolio, perhaps, specifically a retrospective that illustrates the diversity of the artist’s abilities. Sibbald is an award-winning Canadian journalist, and her career-honed skills with language – concision, motion, economy – are on display in this assortment of sixteen tales that demonstrate stylistic versatility. Wryly wrought slices of suburban life? Check. Black Mirror-esque tales of suspense? Yes. Semiautobiographical explorations of a young girl’s journey into adulthood? Read on. The Museum of Possibilities is a surprising read in that you never know what’s on the next page.
The book is separated into three sections. The first is the most kinetic and is filled with greater action and suspense. The titular story is a powerful introduction to the collection: a social worker is dispatched to assist a hoarder, only to learn that the teetering towers of boxes do not contain junk. Instead, they improbably contain tiny dioramas of myriad possible futures, including, possibly, his own. The pace is swift, and the climax unsettling and unexpected. Sibbald keeps the reader in the Twilight Zone with the second story, “Lucid Dream,” a sci-fi suspense tale whose twist ending could have come from one of Stephen King’s better short works. From here, Sibbald changes things up, writing a tale of regretful longing in “Places We Cannot Go” to the metatextual approach of “Things We Hold Dear.” In the latter story, the protagonist takes the role of reader, critiquing the story she’s reading while using it as both mirror of, and window into, her own life.
The stories in the book’s second section, Dispatches from Madawan, have a unifying theme, hanging together as portraits and perspectives of small town lives. Based on impressions and recollections of the author’s own experiences (she was formerly a Renfrew-based rural reporter for the Ottawa Citizen), these works often possess a sly self-awareness. “Funeral Hats,” for example, finds a group of women engaging in a playfully macabre sort of fashion game, only to have that dark humour transform into genuine melancholy by the end.
