Making a Stone of the Heart

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

When Vancouver writer Cynthia Flood was asked recently whether she
intended to write another novel, her answer was yes, one about 90 pages
long with a single lead character. Flood’s first novel, Making a Stone
of the Heart, has more than 300 pages and a cast of characters who act
and react and live and die in a narrative as complex in time and space
as any published in Canada in recent memory.

Dora Cowan, a mother of three children, carries a mummified fetus in
her womb, a lithopaedion, fathered by an itinerant labourer named Owen
Jones. Dora and Owen and, to a lesser degree, Dr. Jonathan Smyth, form
the nucleus of the richly textured plot, which has much to do with the
depredations made by men (and other women) on a woman’s mind and body.
This “stone child” is also, of course, a symbol. Emotions can be
calcified in ways that defy understanding. Circumstances can and often
do create nothing out of something.

Moving backwards through time, from 1967 to 1902, Flood’s story winds
sinuously through its British Columbia landscapes. Owen collects
memories as hard and unyielding as the gallstones he keeps in a jar.
Dora’s life revolves around her children, those who live and those who
died.

This is a difficult book that has characters moving into and out of
focus, shifting time periods, and harsh and brutal dialogue. Flood is
the author of the award-winning story collections My Father Took a Cake
to France and The Animals in Their Elements.