"Strikingly unfashionable." -- Robert Harlow

Buday was the author of several educational books for juveniles, such as Exploring Wildlife in Western Canada, when he drew upon his experiences travelling in Asia to write a first novel, The Venetian (Oolichan, 1987), about Marco Polo and his relationship with Kubla Khan. In it Buday speculates as to how Marco Polo must have reacted to experiencing a different culture. He takes a more prickly and modern perspective in his memoir of travelling alone in India, Golden Goa (ECW Press, 2000), in which he tracks 16th century Portuguese poet Luis Camoens, author of the Lusiads, Portugal's national epic. He has also published a collection of chronological stories with common characters, Monday Night Man (Anvil Press, 1995) and the novels, White Lung (Anvil Press, 1999), A Sack of Teeth (Raincoast, 2002), Rootbound (ECW Press 2006) and Dragonflies (Biblioasis 2008).

Unlike that upbeat single Mom pot-grower in that new TV series, or the pot-cultivating British Properties matron in Douglas Coupland's new comic novel, Buday's 50-year-old bankrupt and paranoid former building contractor turned reluctant pot-grower in Rootbound only goes from bud to worse. As if it isn't hard enough these days with Hydro checking everyone's electricity consumption, poor ol' Willie LeMat, a down-on-his-luck Willie Loman for the entrepreneurial new Millennium, gets his first crop filched and he has no economic alternative but to grow another one and remain ever-fearful it, too, will be poached. His daughter is pregnant by a Burmese monk, his usurious landlord is a conman and his girlfriend paints only self-portraits; meanwhile purblind losers like LeMat, trying to scrape by, are surrounded by real estate speculators making bundles from an Olympics in 2010 that has already gone way over budget. All this would be funny if only it wasn't all-too-plausible.

Never one to shy away from the truth in his fiction, Grant Buday recalls Stalin's systematic starving of two million people in the Ukraine in the 1930s--known as the Holodomor--in his novel about Cyril Andrachuk, the only Canadian-born son of immigrant parents, set in Vancouver in 1962. In The Delusionist (Anvil 2014), Cyril struggles with menial labour jobs during the day but draws incessantly and longs to attend art school. His mother can't imagine why Cyril wants to draw his late-father's tools--saws, drills, hammers, wrenches--and questions his sanity when he begins a series of large, commemorative "Stalin stamps" amid growing family distress. For anyone puzzled about the current headlines involving Russia and Ukraine, this darkly comic novel is a potent reminder why few people can never escape from history, even at the western edge of European migration. [See Review Below]

Critically well-received, but too downbeat to be trendy, Buday won the 2006 Fiddlehead Magazine short fiction contest since he relocated from Vancouver to Mayne Island.

Now you see it, now you don't. In 2016, Grant Buday was announced as the winner of Mona Fertig's 3rd annual Great BC Novel Contest for a manuscript called Atomic Road only to have the award strangely revoked by Fertig "because of a dispute over appropriate authorship attribution." No replacement winner was announced. The 3rd Great BC Novel Contest had 56 manuscript submissions and three finalists were announced November 24, 2015. The winner was announced on March 4th, 2016.

In Orphans of Empire (Brindle and Glass 2020), Buday returns to historical fiction with three stories set in the last half of the 19th century that intertwine at the site of the New Brighton Hotel on Burrard Inlet. Buday's characters are not historical heroes, rather he celebrates the lives of those who live in the shadows of the extraordinary.

***

Orphans of Empire (TouchWood $22)

Mayne Island author, Grant Buday has turned his social critic’s eye on the early settler days of Vancouver in Orphans of Empire (TouchWood $22), in which he brings to life three characters whose lives converge at the site of the historic New Brighton Hotel in the late 1880s. Having grown up and spent his early adult years in East Vancouver, Buday says he frequented New Brighton Park (the site of the long-gone hotel), swam in its pool and walked past the park toward the Alberta Wheat Pool. Buday imagines to life Colonel Richard Moody, whom the British government sent to found British Columbia (and establish a ‘second England’). “Great things are expected of you,” a fellow traveller taunts Moody. The second character introduced is Frisadie, a Hawaiian who arrives in Victoria at the age of seven after her father dies on the voyage leaving her and her mother destitute. Frisadie grows up and buys the New Brighton Hotel, making it the toast of the settlement. And finally, there’s Henry Fannin, orphaned in London, England but makes his way to New Brighton where he becomes an embalmer and finds happiness. 9781927366899 [BCBW 2021]

***

In the Belly of the Sphinx
by Grant Buday (TouchWood / Brindle & Glass $25)

Review by Caroline Woodward (BCBW 2023)

It is 1874 and sixteen-year-old Florence boards the 3rd class train bound for Chicago from New York City in a coach reeking of smoke, beer and unwashed humanity. We readers sidle in alongside the nervous, young thief—and accused murderess, as she was called in that era—and in short order, we learn she likely began her journey in Montreal.

Florence eventually lands in Victoria after a long boat ride north from San Francisco.

I do so love a gripping historical mystery wherein the author grabs you by the neck, holds you up against the wall for the urgent and necessary telling of an incredible story and finally lets you go, dazzled. The reader of In the Belly of the Sphinx, emerges from a fully-imagined “other world,” one populated with Pinkerton detectives, a gallant hussar in uniform, an oily little policeman, a most wonderfully precocious little girl called Pearl, a blowhard imperialist editor who never doubted a word he wrote, malicious private school girls in training to become the Real Wives of Colonialist Victoria, and an Irish maid called Carpy (for Carpenter), who attends Theosophist meetings and speaks of her husband, who perished in a Cumberland coal mine, thusly: “We should’ve gone to Pittsburgh…There were plenty of coal mines there to die in. He weren’t strong. He tried barbering, but his feet hurt and his hands went numb. He thought he might be a cowboy but hurt his spine. He tried whaling but got the vomits.”

These were desperate times for making a hardscrabble living and yet many strains of mysticism, complete with seances, a fascination with exotic rituals and images from India and Egypt, tea leaf and tarot card reading parties, were all in high fashion with the monied classes in Canada as well as Europe. Florence, our desperate murderess and mother of Pearl (yes, author Grant Buday is possessed of a wonderfully droll sense of humour throughout) settles in Victoria, BC where she clings to church-going respectability. She sees it as an essential ritual if she is ever to marry off her daughter to someone decently educated and professional, perhaps even landed gentry, or at least someone upwardly mobile with means like a successful businessman, who might rescue them both from the ever-lurking shame and reality of poverty.

Grant Buday’s brilliant use of language and evocation of early years in the city of Victoria keeps us firmly ensconced in the colonial version of the Victorian era. His own familiarity with a wide variety of blue collar work, like mass production bakeries in Vancouver as told in White Lung (Anvil, 1999) or his memoir about moving to Mayne Island from Main Street, Vancouver, Stranger on a Strange Island (New Star, 2011) wherein he becomes the king of the Recycling Depot, add delicious veracity to this novel as well. So when Pearl falls into a compost bin from the roof of a three-storey rooming house in mid-winter and finds it pleasantly warm, earthy yet fragrant, with coffee grounds most predominant, we accept this to be a highly credible description without the need to replicate her adventure! One is inevitably reminded of a modern-day Charles Dickens.

While the genteel are hosting seances to expand the perceptions of sixth sense en groupe, in Florence and Pearl’s modest home at the breakfast table we hear Carpy pouring the tea (Darjeeling), the clip-clop of the milkwagon’s horse on the front street and from somewhere beyond their back lane, the soft explosion of yet another bottle made by their ale-making neighbour. Buday’s portraits of early Victoria life include: a dreamlike campfire scene on the beach during a November gale, where bedraggled Pearl is welcomed by kind, Songhees women; Judge Begbie—infamously nicknamed “the hanging judge”—singing arias in Italian in the smoky Lord Nelson pub; and later we discover, via late night forays down narrow cobblestone alleys, a cubbyhole shop presided over by a skilled wigmaker in Chinatown. We also meet Charles Gloster, amateur scientist, photographer, world traveller and investigator of exotic religious rituals, another Theosophist like Carpy. He only lacks a wife, it would appear and he courts friendless yet reluctant Florence who is, quite possibly, not quite a widow. Then Florence’s front door is invaded by a scruffy Belfast woman who calls her Sinead Molloy, and Florence’s carefully respectable dance becomes a jig, which is now, as they say, well and truly up.

Through the muddy new civic streets fringed by giant Douglas firs on the outskirts, to the groomed grounds of Craigdarroch and the social event of the year hosted by a famously cranky Lady Dunsmuir, skips our picaresque Pearl, the little girl who becomes a tall and no less audacious teen. She climbs, leaps and finally, weary and disheartened, plods these city streets. But not for long! She chafes at her lot in life, longing to be a pirate, a poet, or some form of dashing rogue, instead of teetering on the edge of respectable behaviour, forever wondering about an absent and possibly fictitious father. She reads a great many books (“I thirst for knowledge,” she says) and then makes one life-altering decision, which is where the belly of a sphinx enters the plot, no thanks to over-indulging in rum-spiked punch at the Dunsmuir gala.
Grant Buday has contributed yet another smart, impeccably researched, highly literate yet never stuffy, slyly hilarious and thoroughly engaging book for his fans. May the latter increase exponentially as this writer deserves a wide readership. 9781990071157

Caroline Woodward reads and writes in the village of New Denver, BC.

See reviews of various Buday books below.

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Stranger on a Strange Island: From Main Street to Mayne Island

BOOKS:

The Venetian (Oolichan, 1987)
Monday Night Man (Anvil Press, 1995)
White Lung (Anvil Press, 1999)
Golden Goa (ECW Press, 2000)
A Sack of Teeth (Raincoast, 2002)
Rootbound (ECW, 2006) $26.95 1-55022-748-3
Dragonflies (Biblioasis, 2008) $19.95 978-1-897231-47-0
Stranger on a Strange Island (New Star Books, 2011) $19.00 9781554200573
The Delusionist (Anvil, 2014) $20 978-1-927380-93-2
Orphans of Empire (Brindle & Glass, 2020) $22 978-1-92736-689-9
In the Belly of the Sphinx (Brindle & Glass/TouchWood Editions, 2023) $25.00 9781990071157

[BCBW 2023] "Fiction"