The Malahat reviews The English Stories

A nice review in what I assume is the current Malahat of Cynthia Flood's The English Stories. Interestingly, the reviewer seems to treat it, at different times, as both a novel and as a collection. It works, I suppose, much as Ray Smith's Century does, as both. Here's to hoping -- come on you BC Book Award jurors! -- that Carol Matthews is right, and the book does indeed earn further distinctions.

Reading The English Stories ... one hears an echo of Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women in the steady voice and sharp eye of the main narrator, Amanda Ellis. uprooted from her predictable life in Toronto and Muskoka, Amanda is transplanted to England for a tw0-year stint while her parents conduct research for the "big book about the Romantic poets" that her father is ostensibly writing. They settle into a small residential hotel with tiny rooms containing obese or skeletal old ladies and men with scarlet knuckles and jagged nails. Called the Green House, the hotel is appropriately named for this time of growth and development during which Amanda experiences all the twists and turns of the classic bildungsroman: a move away from home, clashes of values, questioning of beliefs, awareness of sexuality, and a search for identity and an occupation.
...
Disappointment resonates through most of these lives. Unrealized hopes, unrequited love, unsatisfactory careers, and unfinished books are take for granted and accepted without complaint but, surprisingly, the last word in the novel is joy. ... Flood is a gifted writer who combines intelligent description and poignant portraits to create a rich tableau of people, of places. ... The English Stories, a thoroughly enjoyable, well-crafted collection, deserves further distinctions.

- Carol Matthews

The English Stories ... in England

A blogger over in great Britian has discovered Cynthia Flood's English Stories and had the following to say about them:

Partially because of reading The English Stories by Cynthia Flood. It's a fantastic collection of linked stories about an 11-year-old Canadian named Amanda who is uprooted and sent to a girls' school in 1950s England. Though the book is not set in Canada, Flood evokes Canada in a beautiful yet unsentimental way.

Flood examines the devastation of colonialism in a complex manner, subtly and brilliantly creating links between England's subjugation of Canada, Ireland and Nigeria. Amanda's chosen connection with Canada's First Nations (despite her own parents' racism and indifference) adds another lush layer to this quiet yet persistent background music. Flood also avoids the potentially bad Canadian cliche of the coming-of-age story by switching the focus of several stories from the little girl to other characters in the narrative. This creates a depth and complexity that the story would otherwise lack. One of the most exquisite parts is when we switch to the point of view of an Irish man who sometimes teaches at the school; we see his struggle between English and Irish identity, and the racism he both experiences and inflicts. In places the book is heartbreaking; Flood creeps up on you in unexpected ways.


This was another title which could have quite easily made the Globe 100, or a range of other best -of lists -- and did, I believe, over at Kerry Clare's Pickle Me This. Word of mouth, that best of all possible reviews, however, seems to be helping The English Stories find its audience: if you've yet to do so, go and find a copy.

Kerry Clare on Cynthia Flood

Over at her blog Pickle Me This, Kerry Clare has a rave review of Cynthia Flood's The English Stories. This was a title I really thought might have had some shot at a Giller longlist, at the very least, especially when one considered the makeup of the jury. The good news is that word of mouth is doing very well for this collection, and we're working our way through the last boxes of the initial print run: perhaps a reprint will be necessary. This is as it should be, as this is one of a handful of the best books we've published here at Biblioasis, which I for one think is saying quite a lot.

More good news: according to Kerry, all of the copies of The English Stories in the Toronto Public Library are currently out. So if you live in the GTA and hope to read it soon, might be best to head on down to Ben McNally or Nicholas Hoare or Type Books or your favourite neighbourhood bookseller (even these guys seem to be keeping it in stock, at least for now) and pick yourself up a copy.

From the review:

This was an England not long out of war, in the throes of an age of austerity, coming to terms (or not yet) with fundamental changes in values and beliefs, and grappling with centuries of a empirical past that was quickly becoming irrelevant. And though Flood's protagonist is young, her stories' themes are not, which becomes the point-- Amanda struggling with the gap between the world as it is and her limited understanding. Understanding which is little achieved here, for Amanda is only eleven after all, and then just twelve, and thirteen. Far too young yet for "coming of age" and Flood doesn't do such neat resolutions anyway.

What she does do is a marvelous sentence: "At lunch on the rainy February day the King died, the sweet was custard and stewed damsons" opens "Early in the Morning", or "The Spring term in which Kay died and Constance disappeared from St. Mildred's, and I broke my glasses featured a school wide obsession with mealtime talk of sex" begins "Magnificat". These sentences both convey the way in Flood encapsulates the world wide and near, the great and small, inside her literary universe.

Read the rest here.

Cynthia Flood: The Rabble Interview

I haven't been doing my usual check-in on writer's websites these past few months, and so missed this link on Cynthia's to this summer's interview with Vancouver Co-op Radio. To listen, please go here.

Post-Tour (A Cynthia Flood Post)

When east-bound planes take off from Vancouver they fly west first, past the delta and towards the Gulf Islands. Far below, the great plume of the Fraser River, cloudy dark brown, meets the green of Georgia Strait. Then the jet turns. The mountains are pale blue in the early morning.
After that, days and days of Book Tour zipped by before I really looked at any landscape again.

Toronto -- Ben McNally's beautiful store, with family and friends gathered for my reading. Thanks Rebecca for the fine intro! Afterwards, dinner at Torrino's, and then an unexpected ride home in a convertible Volvo with the top down and Ferron singing at high volume as we five roared along Richmond Street in the rainy dark, waving to the multitudes.

Ottawa -- People from The Nation's Capital smile fondly when I say, "My reading was at the Manx Bar." Such a great place that is, and a fine reading series led by David O'Meara. Pals from college days appeared (we are all even more beautiful than we were then), and also friends from other rooms in the house of my life. That's a fine thing about Book Tour: remaking connections.

Waterloo -- Another terrific bookstore and manager, Words Worth and David Worsley, and a meeting at last with Terry Griggs, and then a tiny audience that was nonetheless fun to be with. We had a good Book Tour evening together.

Guelph -- One more many-star store! The Bookshelf, with owner Barbara and manager Dan Evans, plus a restaurant/bar, plus a movie theatre -- a cultural hub. At last, after exchanging 100s of emails, I happily met Dan Wells of Biblioasis. Then Terry Griggs and I were joined by Kari Grimstad, widow of Hans Eichner, the author of "Kahn & Engelmann." In a magical Book Tour way, our three readings all leaned towards the comic, and the large audience had a good time.

Windsor -- A unique venue, the Canadian Anglo Club, on a little strip mall. Ah, the decline of Empire. . . yet within, no decline! Dartboards, flags, a startling handpainted mural of Britain, and a terrific spread of culturally appropriate food prepared by Biblioasis' publicity manager Laurie Smith: cucumber sandwiches, Peek Frean biscuits, a huge trifle, and Empire cookies. Paul Vasey, retired CBC host, interviewed me as part of the evening's entertainment.

Toronto again -- in the reference branch of the Public Library I clicked on the Globe's review of The English Stories. Such a moment when that headline appeared: "In A Class Of Her Own." I'll savour that Book Tour memory too.

Now I'm back in Vancouver, resettling into my life here.

The day after my return we went with friends for a picnic in the arboretum at Riverview. That's a sad though beautiful place, once a vast institution for thousands of mentally ill people; now it houses only a few hundred. The grounds are large and feature many unique or unusual trees, planted over nearly a century by devoted gardeners. Sycamore maples, camperdown elms, rare locusts and oaks and tulip trees -- all have been spared the pruning that trees in parks usually suffer. Need I say that the condo developers have their eye on this spectacular greenspace?
We wandered about the greensward among these huge beautiful creatures, trees tall enough to make worlds of their own. At one point we lay down on the grass under an enormous European beech and looked up. From a distance the leaves had looked dark red, almost black, but now they were soft green edged with pink, in a great plume against the pale blue sky of early evening.

That made a beautiful end to Book Tour.

Vancouver Sun reviews Flood's English Stories

by Candace Fertile

Vancouver writer Cynthia Flood has won a slew of prizes for her fiction, and her latest book, a collection of linked short stories called The English Stories, shows why the accolades are so well deserved. Flood is a thoughtful writer whose richly dense prose opens up worlds to explore.

In this collection of 12 stories, she employs several narrative stances to show what happens when a Canadian couple and their daughter go to Oxford, England, for two years in the early 1950s. Gerald Ellis is an academic working on Keats and Shelley -- or, as he and his editor wife, Rachel, joke, "Sheets & Kelly."

The wordplay is extended by Flood, particularly to expose the difficulties 11-year-old Amanda Ellis has with her Canadian accent and vocabulary.

Amanda is at the centre of the stories. The collection begins and ends with a third-person narrator focusing on her departure from Canada and her return.

In some of the stories, Amanda is the narrator, giving the perspective of a young girl thrust into uncomfortable circumstances.

She is sent to boarding school so her parents can travel, unencumbered, for their research. Flood does an amazing job of getting into Amanda's head and describing what life is like at St. Mildred's School, a no-nonsense establishment meant to prepare girls for the world, but which destroys some in the process.

Intelligence and being Canadian partially save Amanda from the grief that afflicts other students.

As for me, my Canadian speech and ways precluded both popularity and rejection. I'd settled into the familiar route of a minor planet, not as peripheral as the weepers who didn't have a clue and threw balls poorly, nor as the other foreigners orbiting further out -- the girl from the Orkneys with an accent so peculiar she scarcely spoke, and the Irish girl suspected of Roman Catholicism.

Amanda occasionally leaves the school to stay with her parents at The Green House, a residential hotel where some rather eccentric characters live. Flood dips into the lives of the teachers at St. Mildred's and the inhabitants of The Green House and uses different narrative points of view.

In The Usual Accomplishments, for example, Flood focuses on the elderly twins Milly and Tilly Talbot and their penchant for doing puzzles from The Times.

They are quite competitive with the puzzles, and Flood shows how circumscribed their lives have been because of gender and economics.

In A Civil Plantation, the only male teacher at the school tells his story. He agonizes over a grade he gives Amanda for a picture she has drawn of English settlers planted in the ground, their mouths open in Edvard Munch-like screams.

The multiple voices create a vast and profound examination of time and place. So many of the characters appear trapped in worlds not of their own making, and unhappiness infiltrates most of the lives.

Along with the unhappiness is a kind of acceptance of how things are and, as visitors, the Ellis family provides a counterpoint to the others in Oxford. The Ellises get to go home and resume their comfortable lives. But the others (with the exception of some schoolgirls) carry on valiantly, if perhaps gracelessly.

One of the guests at the hotel is Captain George Belland, who is in Oxford to study for his viva voce (an oral exam). Occasionally his wife comes to stay with him, and they are a wildly mismatched couple. Belland would love to emigrate to Canada to teach in a boys' school, but it's quite clear that his wife would never agree.

He pumps the Ellises for information about Canada and is delighted when Amanda shows him her "Indian box," a handcrafted container of birchbark, sweetgrass and porcupine quills.

But Belland has his dark side, and while the adults understand what is happening between him and his wife, Amanda doesn't. Readers see her confusion and her desire to know, but no one will explain.

The English Stories is a remarkable book. Flood's insight and skilful prose illuminate a diversity of characters and provoke thoughtful sympathy for people caught in lives they wouldn't have chosen, given a choice.

In A Class of Her Own: A Globe Review of Cynthia Flood's The English Stories

Reviewed by Linda Grace Philippsen

Vancouver writer Cynthia Flood, whose past novels and short stories have been distinguished with numerous awards including The Journey Prize, takes readers into the milieu of 1950s England in her latest collection, The English Stories.

Flood recreates the cultural, social, political and economic tenor of the era by examining the lives of various middle-class characters. Through linked narratives, she develops the thematic complexity of a novel but gives readers the satisfaction of short stories – the more dense and intense art form. And by using several voices to narrate the stories, she achieves greater depth than the single perspective of her principle child-narrator, Amanda Ellis, would allow.

Amanda, a plucky fifth-grade girl, is uprooted from her familiar Muskoka, Ont., surroundings to a residential hotel, The Green House, in Oxford. She attends St. Mildred's as a day girl. She boards during those times that her father, Gerald, on a fellowship to write a book on Keats and Shelley, and mother, Rachel, an editor, must travel for research.

No longer shielded by the WASP pretensions of her colonial Canada, Amanda discovers how the maps and the margins of her world have altered without “my own country spread solidly around me.” In addition to coping with loneliness, bullying, and the sexual hazing of “dirty night,” she can't come top in anything because the penmanship learned in Canada slants incorrectly, and marks evaporate from her exercises and tests. Assignments that deserve more are given less, because, Mr. Greene, instructor of Foreign Affairs (the only male at St. Mildred's other than Fitzgerald the factotum) explains, “She must learn shame.”

English becomes a foreign language. People hoover. Girls wear frocks and plimsolls. No one speaks the word toilet; they spend a penny and use the loo. Branches rhymes with launches. Amanda chafes “at the mockery at St. Mildred's for her lapses in English usage and accent. She would never learn the language, not entirely. Never.”

In this ultra class-conscious world that meticulously sorts insiders from out, “One word can kill,” says Mr. Greene, who is not only adept with languages, but also “Irish as Paddy's pig.” However, he has “cracked the code and achieved a flawless accent,” thereby passing for what he is not. He lets drop, “Miss Pringle and Miss Hodgson [the Head and Assistant Head] are irreproachably Home Counties, but Miss Lincoln's speech is too carefully not northern, while I suspect that Miss Flower's gentle voice overlies an origin involving coins, counter, and till.”

Miss Pringle bemoans the ubiquitous materialism, lapsed moral standards and the lasting stringencies of a war that cost Britain its imperial status. Though she claims to welcome “the post-war trend of arrivals from other lands in the Commonwealth, as we are now to call it,” her bigotry is obvious. “The ways of life followed by persons from the Caribbean ... cause social disruption. Naturally, there is nothing of this sort with Amanda, who is indistinguishable from her classmates, but.”

Perhaps the most compelling of Flood's wonderfully imperfect characters, Pringle's charm is in her restraint. Hers is the only diary in the collection, and reading it is deliciously akin to snooping through things that were never meant to be known. She subtly reveals much – pride, prejudice, meticulous attention to detail and a stiff upper lip. However, telling exclamation marks that are as school-girlish as her charges (HRH) and Victorian connotations of words also reveal her hidden passion and love.

In all, here is little to fault here without seeming petty. A minor incongruence: Flood creates a precocious, pre-pubescent narrator who, in some instances, is bewildered and insecure, in others poised, challenging authority with questions well beyond her tender years.

Tellingly, in an interview with Laurie Smith in which she probed for which aspects of the stories might be based on “real people” in Flood's parallel childhood experience, Flood says, “The theological issues [Amanda raises] actually came up in Canada in my high school years.” Exactly.

The English Stories consistently delight for their careful craft and thematic intricacy, but especially for their attention to language – the pleasure of logos. Word. Green House resident retired Professor McGeachie tells Amanda the Greek alphabet is the beginning of learning, “The first step to Low Goes.” In play-by-play fashion, 77-year-old twins Tilly and Milly battle to complete The Times Crossword each day. Amanda keeps lists: amaranth, ignoble, crystal, vicissitude.

As well, for the knowledgeable reader looking back on the politics, prejudices and practices of the day, the stories are charged with dramatic irony. Readers realize the disquieting truths the author reveals even though the characters are blind to a broader world-view and their own flaws. Still, the microcosm in which they operate is universal and representative, even today.

This is perfect summer reading. Without being light or trite it can be picked up and put down with ease, and the characters linger with the reader long after.

Lynda Grace Philippsen is a freelance writer and contributor to A Verse Map of Vancouver.

A Rather Late Cynthia Flood Pre-Tour Post

I'm a bit late getting this one up: Cynthia sent it to me while I was in New York, but I had a lot of problems getting online at the hotel. And, truth be told, a lot of other places I either needed or wanted to be. In any case, here's Cynthia on her Ontario tour.

Funny Retirement. Religious Baby.

Those are categories in the greeting card aisle of the local drugstore, but there are none labelled Voiceless Book Tour. For three days this past week such a card would have been appropriate for me. Only a kind of short dry squeak was possible, and even that hurt.

To spend days in silence is in some ways pleasant. No effort is required. Others do all the talking. Because of my speechlessness they sometimes went into a lot of interesting and thoughtful detail, impossible if I'd been in my usual mode of Yes but and Don't you think and Why on earth doesn't he, etc. Also, in many conversations (not just the ones I'm in!), listeners often do not really listen to speakers but just wait greedily for their turn. That pattern too was broken. To be outside of habit felt good. Finally, because I couldn't talk I could read even more than usual. Always welcome, that.

So -- yes it was restful, yes instructive, but all the time I was anxious as the squirrels now rushing about the roof and eaves of our house. They are frantic with parenthood; my brain ran horrid fantasies of being unable to do my readings in Ontario. I'd have to sit silent, feeling a total idiot. Meanwhile some luckless "volunteer" would read parts of The English Stories aloud. And I wouldn't be able to greet anyone who bought a book and wanted it signed. And of course I wouldn't be able to do any interviews. And and and.

On the last full day of laryngitis, while editing the bulletin board in our kitchen I found among the cartoons and clippings a quotation from Sathya Sai Baba: "Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?"

That erased all the anxiety. Gone gone gone. Completely.

Yes, my voice is back, about 85% today, and I hope 100% by Tues June 2 when I read at Ben McNally's Bookstore, 366 Bay Street, Toronto, 6 pm. I'm happy at the prospect of the two weeks ahead. The clipping's in my wallet. I do believe I'm ready for the book tour.

Blogging Biblioasis Book Launches (a Rebecca post)

Monday was the Toronto launch of Terry Griggs's Thought You Were Dead, at McNally Robinson's. Though I sadly had to miss it, August Bourre's write-up of the evening gives a good sense of it.

Last night (Tuesday, for those falling behind) was the launch Toronto of Cynthia Flood's The English Stories at Ben McNally Books (no relation). This one I actually made it to, and though most of my pictures turned out bizarrely terrible (everyone was smeared with orange, as though on fire) here are a couple of Cynthia reading, which I think convey both her poise and animation, and the sheer loveliness that is that bookstore:




It really was a charming evening, with a good size crowd, cake and coffee and conversation, and of course a wonderful 20 or so minutes of reading. There was also a warm and lively Q&A at the end--everyone asked astute things (even me, I think and I never ask questions at Q&As) and Cynthia answered beautifully. When my posse left, the informal talk-and-sign-books-and-eat-cake portion of the event was still going strong.

The evening began with me giving an introduction to Cynthia and her book, largely provided by Dan but somewhat annotated by me. In case you couldn't be there and wondered just what *The English Stories* is all about, below is more or less the text of that intro, minus the stumbles over hard hard words like "collections." I'll leave Dan's words alone and put my own in square brackets, so that no one confuses intentionality (I pointed out where I deviated from the text at the event, too!) Also, Dan probably would not have chosen to speak publicly wearing an orange sweater with a bow on it.

The book that we’ve gathered here tonight to celebrate is a very special one. As a publisher and as a reader, Cynthia Flood’s work constitutes one of my greatest and most joy-filled discoveries. My Father Took a Cake to France and The Animals in their Elements are exquisite collections; and her new book, The English Stories, almost miraculously, improves upon these earlier efforts. It rates as one of the best books I think we’ve done here at Biblioasis, and it is a quiet marvel of a book. Through individual, linked stories, Cynthia has managed to create a fully realized, almost novelistic world. [I would add for myself that this is the miraculous part: the varied ways Cynthia provides for us to see into this world. Through a child's eyes, an old woman's, a male teachers. Also, the variety of narrative forms these view take: a simple narrative description of a day in the country as seen my that child, the working of a crossword puzzle, a history of Irish struggles in England.

Cynthia and I share an editor in John Metcalf, and he once put the question to me, "Well, do you want to be clever, or do you want to be profound?" In this collection, Cynthia Flood has leapt over this dilemma. While many of the structures mentioned above do *sound* clever--who wouldn't like to see how a crossword-based story could work?--once you read them, you see that these aren't constructs imposed on the stories from without, but organic to the characters and genuinely the best and only way the stories could have been told. In Cynthia Flood's hand, something clever becomes something genuinely profound.]

The collection ranks, in my mind, right up there with Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. It’s a collection to be very proud of, and I feel quite honoured to have it on my list. Though The English Stories is a quiet marvel of a book, this does not mean that we need to be quiet about it. Everyone here tonight needs to make a pact, with blood, if necessary – such pacts play a role in the collection – to let anyone who might be interested in Cynthia’s book know about it. Please: help me spread the word. If the literary gods are just – they have a tendency to be a rather fickle lot – Cynthia’s English Stories will turn up on several prize lists come September. It is that kind of book, and she is that kind of writer. Perhaps if we raise our voices both loud and long enough, those literary Gods might take note. And isn’t it really about time?

Congratulations to Cynthia on the publication of a wonderful, wonderful book. I wish I could be at Ben McNally's myself this night, but have been on the road for the last two weeks, and won't be getting back until tomorrow night. But I wish to thank everyone who came out to Ben's place this evening to kick off Cynthia's Ontario tour, and for helping to make this night such a success. [From me, too! Please welcome Cynthia Flood.]

Rebecca

Launching The English Stories (A Cynthia Flood Post)

One strategy when facing an exciting but stressful prospect is -- not exactly denial, but displacement. As the launch for The English Stories got nearer and nearer, all my agitation about the book's quality and its probably dismal reception and the dreadful reviews to come (or, worse, the absence of any reviews) and the terrible sales and the snide remarks due from certain people -- all of that drained away into worry over the venue.

Convinced that I'd got carried away and invited far too many people for the space, again and again I ran a bunch of disaster fantasies. Annoyed guests leaving in a huff. Complaints from the hotel's other patrons. Serious discomfort for the elderly and disabled among those invited to my event. Not enough books for sale. Not enough food. Not enough chairs. By the afternoon of the event I was even fretting about vases, in case anyone brought flowers. . . .

Several anyones did -- irises, alstromeria, tulips, orchids, azaleas, all by chance in a palette of purples and pinks and mauves. They looked beautiful in their vases. There was a big crowd but just enough room, and a lot of noise so I had to Project Strongly as I read, and fine food, and lively conversation, and laughter, and a beautiful view of English Bay on a summer evening, and much general enthusiasm. Every single book got sold. Altogether it was a great evening, and timeless in that way things are when concentration on the Now is total.

So The English Stories have been launched. They're quite separate now, floating away, on currents over which I have no control. And early reactions are coming in. Surprising, some of them.

My literary education predated post-modernism by a chunk of years, and I've never been able to accept the notion that a writer has perhaps even less idea of what a text is about than any reader. (An analogy -- if I cook a cheese souffle for dinner and a guest says, "What a terrible fish stew you've made," it's hard to take that comment seriously. Yes, I know analogies don't make arguments all by themselves.)

Still, it is true that a writer can learn a lot about what s/he's written by listening to what readers notice, what moves or upsets or interests or angers them, which characters they care for, what brings tears, which descriptions make them frown, which story endings they regret or are happy about. That's the agenda now for The English Stories -- discovery. It'll be interesting for sure.

The English Stories Vancouver Launch: May 14th at the Sylvia Hotel

Thoughts on Holding a New Book (A Cynthia Post)

First -- wow, so handsome!

Brilliant colours, striking design. Book sits well in the hand. Interior design very clean, clear. No typos visible. Table of contents -- looks to me like a curious bunch of story titles. Acknowledgments -- warm feelings about all those good people in my life. Roses, roses all the way. . . .

Second -- but so small! The English Stories is tiny.

Under my desk there's a big plastic tub file full of notes (pigs, NFB, hedgeteachers, how glass fails, minor Victorian poets), notebooks and notebooks, handwritten drafts, country and city maps, yellow lined pads thick with quotations (Bible, Eliot, Wodehouse, Shakespeare), a pack of index cards on the history of Ireland, computer printouts, correspondence with magazine editors, printouts of emails, schoolgirls' stories, reminders about Henry VIII and Anglicanism, letters to and from English friends, litmags that originally published some of the stories, 1950s women's mags and Punch and The Countryman, handwritten paragraphs taped together with computer-printed bits, newsletters from Canadian and English schools, more drafts, more drafts, more.

And that's only one box. There's also a file drawer for English Stories, and another box.

A bunch of years are compressed into this little book, too, for the first story appeared in Event in 1993. Quite a long time, in one life.

What to say?

Here's the new book, and I'm happy.

Literary Value First

A couple of nice reviews -- Feature Reviews, no less -- by James Grainger in the current Q&Q of two of our Spring titles: Terry Griggs's Thought You Were Dead and Cynthia Flood's The English Stories. Of Dead Grainger writes, in part: Thought You Were Dead can be summarized as a playful deconstruction of the genteel drawing room detective novel, brimming with knowing winks to fans of the genre and the more highbrow reader ... Beith finds himself in the middle of a sinister plot of Chandleresque complexity. / The narrative and dialogue are clever and lively from beginning to end, and many readers will enjoy the layers of comic nuance as Griggs turns the genre inside out. Beith is a fine take on the stock character of the reluctant gentleman detective ..."

Of Flood he writes: "Flood artfully transplants the conventions of the Canadian Gothic story form and its obsession with death, isolation, madness and antural landscape into the satiric, provincial milieu of the genteel British lower-middle-classes enshrined in the works of V.S. Prichett. ... Flood creates a vivid gallery of British types ... (and) these stories ultimately acheive a brooding resonance that captures the literal and spiritual dampness of a provincial scene that all but died out with the last remnants of the British Empire."

Religious Knowledge: A Story from Cynthia Flood's The English Stories

In anticipation of the publication of Cynthia Flood's The English Stories -- set for May 1st -- I offer you one of the stories from the collection, the haunting and moving Religious Knowledge.

English Stories SCRIBD

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Fiction Books girls england

What Do They Mean? ( A Cynthia Flood Post)

To a child, teachers seem coarse in their perceptions. Stupid, really. Can't they see that it's useless ordering a mean girl not to be mean? Do they seriously expect anyone to inform on a popular girl? Why do they smile and lean so close, showing their ugly gums and wrinkles to girls already scared witless by having to recite before the whole class?

Such bewildering behaviour. When writing The English Stories I sometimes felt that bewilderment again, though as a (coarse and stupid) adult myself Icould now see better what those teachers, or mistresses as the English then said, were trying to do.

Still clearer, as the writing went on, was the fact of the two solitudes within the school: the girls, the adult women. They were so close, what with hours and hours and hours daily in the same rooms and at the same dining-tables and on the same playing fields -- yet separate, even speaking different Englishes.

That near/far relation turns up often in The English Stories, not only at the boarding school but also at the small residential hotel. There live the Talbot twins, Milly and Tilly, together for nearly eight decades, dressed always in not quite identical clothing. The two love and hate each other intensely, but neither knows the essential story of her sister's life.

Two other residents, the newly-married Bellands, both idealize the calm safety of domestic life after the horrors of World War II. Each is mystified, though, by the other's plans for attaining that place of peace. They speak but can't make sense of each other's words -- can hardly hear them, really. Each sees the other as lost in illusion. (I think they both are, but that's another matter.)

Gerald and Rachel Ellis, Amanda's parents, have been married far longer and have a quite baroquely developed public persona as a couple. They too, though, find their mates puzzling. They too can't make themselves clear, in spite of being highly literate and literary. Habits, tastes, pleasure, memories, the whole shared culture of a pair -- they're not enough to enable true understanding.

And of course they are both lovingly blind to their daughter. As she is blind to them. . . .

Beginnings: The English Stories (A Cynthia Flood Post)

A pig. A question. A filthy fingernail. A bead of ice. In the early 90s these four met each other in my head and reported that they could start a story going. It turned out to be "Country Life," the second in The English Stories.

How does that happen? Alice Munro has somewhere described how a single image or action or word can be a magnet, pulling other story elements to itself. That's a familiar process for many writers, though not always fruitful. The disparate things can just stay that way. Or they may only adhere for a bit before collapsing, especially if the writer gets antsy and tries to force other things into the mix.

My four however got on well, and led me deep into a district of memory I'd hardly visited in decades: two years in England when I was 11 and 12. Naturally then I'd focused on the girls in my year at school or on the kids of family friends. In middle age I focused just the same way, and all the middle-aged people from that period walked out of the background to meet me.

Not boring, after all.

Eccentric? At first they seemed so. Then they began to make sense, partially, but I was annoyed at them for not Doing Something about their lives. After a while I started to feel sad for them. Sadder. Later, admiration started. It grew, and imagination worked on the priceless gifts those people gave me, and new characters appeared. Miss Lucinda Jones in "Country Life" is no one I ever met or heard of, but her principles, her attitudes are illustrative of many people encountered during those English years.

After "Country Life" was finished I saw that again I had written about characters who embody particular ideologies -- not consciously or explicitly like the politicos I've lived among for years, but in their daily doings, their choices in life, their habits of mind.

I didn't expect to write further about my English years. "Country Life" was just another story. I'd enjoyed writing it and was happy when it won the Western Magazines Award.

As for those items -- the pig lived on a beautiful farm, a heavenly farm I visited as a child in England. The arithmetic questions came at me from an old family friend. The dirty nail was Struwwelpeter's; he was a wicked boy in a book behind glass doors at a Toronto neighbour's. The beads of ice, on pussywillows set to adorn a dining-table, I never saw. That was my mother's story.

Introducing Cynthia Flood's The English Stories

Cynthia Flood's The English Stories is a quiet marvel of a book, set to be released May 1st. A series of linked fictions detailing the story of Amanda Ellis, a young Canadian girl who goes with her parents to England "for a year that stretched into two," and her life at St. Mildred's school, it is a collection which should help to cement Biblioasis's reputation as one of the pre-eminent presses for the short story in Canada -- not that there are many out there vying for such a distinction. Unlike many linked short story collections -- Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women comes to mind -- Flood's suite is not limited to first person narration, but rather offers a range of perspectives, including those of teachers at St. Mildred's, guests at the Green House, a hotel the Ellis family stays at through out their journey, among others. The feel of this collection is much more novelistic than many, as Flood captures a fully realized and inter-connected world. Like Munro's Girls and Women, this as well is a coming of age tale; but its range is also quite a bit more broad than this. The English Stories offers a subtle portrayal of an England cut adrift, unsure of itself as its Empire collapses into the less grand Commonwealth, and of the ensuing tensions which become obvious in the everyday interactions between the English and their colonial brethren. First and foremost this is evinced through language, the subtle -- and occasionally not-so-subtle -- slighting of colonials, and the different ways identities are shaped and communities differentiated by everyday rituals and commonplaces.

John Metcalf, who edited this collection, has said that he think The English Stories ranks as among the Top Ten short fiction collections published in Canada, ever. Regardless, it is a magnificent book, and one that I hope reaches its fair share of readers.

We'll be having Cynthia in to guest-blog in the coming weeks about the origins of this collection. Also working to set up an Ontario tour, likely in June, so stay tuned.