Afternoon Tea

David A. Kent teaches English at Centennial College and is the editor of
Christian Poetry in Canada.

Brad Robinson’s Afternoon Tea consists of six stories that take the reader from the sultry days and nights of Malaysia to Hong Kong, to the west coast of Canada, and finally to the streets of Toronto. But though the settings for the stories move from Oriental exotic to Occidental mundane, Robinson’s direct style and tactile prose manage to disclose the extraordinary in the ordinary in every location — whether it be the unexpected story of generous patronage for the son of a trishaw driver on the irreconcilable divide between a student and a bag lady in the concluding story. While “The Pen-and-Ink Clerk” (easily the longest story in the collection) is especially evocative of the stifling heat of Malaysia, each of the stories has its own very real enticements and each records its own particular discovery or revelation, be it about the irrecoverable past or contemporary matters of power and politics and the disenfranchised. Robinson’s first book demonstrates an enviable controlling intelligence and gives promise for the future. For now, these stories constitute a modest aim, as the title suggests: it is to be hoped that a substantial meal will follow.