1951 Victorian history as a ‘ludicrous romp’

In the Belly of the Sphinx
by Grant Buday

Victoria: TouchWood Editions, 2023
$25.00 / 9781990071157

Reviewed by Carol Matthews

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In the epigraph to his latest novel, Mayne Island’s Grant Buday reprints this question by Celine: “And where, I ask you, can a man escape to when he hasn’t enough madness inside him?” Celine, in The Watch that Ends the Night, answers with, “The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.” Certainly, In the Belly of the Sphinx contains much madness, many lies, and several deaths. There’s also a seduction, a teenage pregnancy, and an unhappy marriage thrown in for good measure.

The book’s blurbs compare the writing to that of Hilary Mantel, Patrick deWitt, and Guy Vanderhaeghe, but I saw it as reminiscent of Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which typically feature damsels in distress, hidden identities, castles, and supernatural forces much like In the Belly of the Sphinx.

The novel captures you in its first few pages during which, in 1874, we are introduced to young Florence at a train station where she is en route from New York to Chicago. She is preoccupied with a memory: a rolling pin in her hand, a man and woman lying on the floor with their skulls caved in, and the wristwatches and jewellery stuffed into a satchel she now carries. (It’s not until over 150 pages later that Buday relates the circumstances of this crime scene.)

A handsome young hussar in a pompous red uniform invites Florence into his compartment and hides her from the Pinkerton men who are searching for a young woman. The chapter ends with Florence and the soldier, Edward Greyland-Smith, sitting by the sea in Victoria. He first proposes marriage, but she refuses. Carpe diem, he adds, and, “Let’s make the most of the night.”

Ten pages and ten years later, Florence still resides in Victoria and is raising her daughter, Pearl, who idealizes the father she knows only through a framed photograph on the wall. She admires his splendid red uniform with its braids, buttons, and epaulets, and she talks to his photographs, proposing to her mother that they hold a séance and speak to her father’s soul. Florence considers this briefly but decides that “it would encourage the ridiculous whims of which her daughter had enough already.”

Florence has acquired a peculiar but affordable housemaid named Carpy. A squat secretive woman whose possessions include dried roots, herbs, and glass jars in which she traps ghosts and releases them into the sea, she has a “rat-quick” intelligence and is a regular at meetings of the Theosophical Society.

While Florence has now become “the epitome of propriety and decorum,” Pearl, at seventeen, is a wildly imaginative girl who is twice referred to as “a queer duck” and who describes herself as having “a thirst for knowledge.” She also has a hunger for adventure and romance.

Posing before a mirror, she compares herself to Elizabeth the First and Catherine the Great. As she holds her arms high above her head she observes, “You are Eve. You are Aphrodite. You are Venus. Tremble, all who approach.” It’s not surprising that she persuades her mother to find a way of getting invited to Lady Dunsmuir’s gala at Craigdarroch Castle, an event at which she drinks several glasses of punch and allows herself to be seduced by the handsome Inspector Osmo Beattie.

Meanwhile, Florence is having her own amorous encounters as she is pursued by two suitors. There’s Mr. Gloster, a traveller to exotic places like Darjeeling and Isfahan; like Carpy, he regularly attends meetings of the Theosophical Society. And there is devoted Dr. Meadows. He treats Florence’s ailments with lemon rind, ginger, sticks of cinnamon, and stout. He’s keen to discuss the benefits of galvanism in treating depression and paralysis.

Buday (Orphans of Empire) populates the novel with some strange humans and also an array of creatures: in addition to a cobra (Cleopatra), dog (Medusa), and ferret (Roderick), there’s an ape named Ulysses. Pearl is surprisingly well-read, referring to writers like Homer, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare. There are many historical references to people like Judge Begbie, Sir John A. McDonald, and Louis Riel—including Pearl’s thinking about the story of Eunice Wilkins who was said to have been “captured by Mohawks in 1703,” married a Mohawk, and refused to return to her family.

It’s a fast-paced novel that describes a lively, dangerous, and often humorous chase in which Pearl acquires and plants clues—a snake, a sphinx, a mummified cat–that she envisions will lead Inspector Beattie to marry her (and they will then lie “in bed with their limbs entwined while he examines her criminal cases like pieces of jewellery”).

Although Pearl’s best-laid plans go awry, she is often able to laugh at her dilemmas and wonders if nihilism is the “branch of philosophy that concluded that nothing mattered. Was there a branch of philosophy that included that everything was ludicrous?”

While serious matters such as colonialism, the patriarchy, religion and superstition are hinted at throughout the novel, in the end we are left with the sense of a ludicrous romp.

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Carol Matthews has worked as a social worker, as Executive Director of Nanaimo Family Life, and as instructor and Dean of Human Services and Community Education at Malaspina University-College, now Vancouver Island University. She has published a collection of short stories (Incidental Music, from Oolichan Books) and four works of non-fiction. Her short stories and reviews have appeared in literary journals such as Room, The New Quarterly, Grain, Prism, Malahat Review, and Event. [Editor’s note: Carol Matthews has reviewed books by Kasia Van Schaik, Kristjana Gunnars, David Essig, Diane Schoemperlen, Susan Juby, Charles Demers, and Susan Sanford Blades for BCR. Valerie Green reviewed Matthews’ Minerva’s Owl: The Bereavement Phase of My Marriage.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-24: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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