Their father is walking down the bank.
“Come on.” She jiggles the door handle and hits Norma on the arm to wake her up. Norma moans in protest but doesn’t open her eyes. All Lou can see now is their father’s hat. He must be on the edge of the bank.
Lou starts to climb over Norma, and then it comes to her that her door is locked, not stuck, and she turns back around, pulls up the button, opens the door and jumps out. The rain is like a hose turned on her. “Dad!” she screams.
The only people anywhere near him are under a black umbrella, facing the other way. They don’t hear her either. She runs across the parking lot and the road. A car throws up a wave of water, drenching her. The car behind it skids, honks. She screams “Dad!” again as the black umbrella moves away from him, as a seagull swoops down from the sky and circles above his head.
He just seems to be standing there. Listing. The seagull won’t go. The seagull is their mother, Lou thinks, already reincarnated.
There is so much rain that there are puddles on the grass. Lou splashes through them. She stops. Where is the hat? God, God, she can’t see his hat! There goes their mother, flying off.
“Come back!” Lou screams at their father. “Come back! Fucking idiot!”
Their father is gone.
Lou is at the railing now, dashing up and down the bank, shouting “Dad!” She races to where the people under the black umbrella were, where you can see the falls and the river below.
Nothing. Not even his hat. No trace.
She stands there, stunned. Rain pours over her. The seagull flies back. The seagull who is their mother, Lou thinks. Their mother plunges into the water and shoots up with a fish, then soars into the mist, the fish drooping out her bill.
The rain feels warm now, almost hot. Lou shuts her eyes. Something obscene is happening to her. She is getting that feeling again, as if the rain is washing away her resistance to it, washing away whatever else she should be feeling, and all that’s left is relief, ecstasy, the sheer happiness she experienced up on the roof and in the washroom at the funeral parlour.
“Mommy,” she says out loud, like a child, appealing and apologizing to the bird, but as the feeling peaks and fades, the idea grows in her that the reason their mother flew by was to give the feeling to her. A benediction, a legacy, last words, comfort from the other side. “You are on your own now. The world is all yours. Your father is the fish I ate.”
A tremor passes through Lou’s body. She starts crying. She runs back to the car, where her sisters are asleep. The rain is hot, and her feet don’t seem to touch the ground.
About the Author
BARBARA GOWDY is the award-winning author of The Romantic, The White Bone, Mister Sandman and We So Seldom Look on Love. Her books have appeared on bestseller lists throughout the world. The recipient of the Marian Engel Award, she has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a repeat finalist for the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Gowdy’s most recent novel is Helpless. She lives in Toronto. Visit her at www.barbaragowdy.ca.
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Also by Barbara Gowdy
THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY
WE SO SELDOM LOOK ON LOVE
MISTER SANDMAN
THE WHITE BONE
THE ROMANTIC
HELPLESS
Praise for Falling Angels
“Falling Angels is a provocative exercise in black humour that puts early Weldon novels in the shade.”
—Time Out (London)
“Barbara Gowdy uses all the best features of the domestic novel and then, with startling plot turns and unsettling imagery, takes the whole story to a much higher level.”
—The Whig-Standard Magazine
“My discovery of the year is Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels. This sometimes shocking and sometimes hilarious novel about three girls growing up under the influence of an alcoholic mother and an abusive father in suburban Toronto in the ‘60s says more to me about adolescent female experience in that time and place than Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Susan Swan’s Last of the Golden Girls rolled into one.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“[Gowdy’s] insights are dead-on and enlightening…. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Calgary Herald
“There are some writers who come winging in on you on the first page and then just never let up. Barbara Gowdy is one of these. She knows how to move a story along, and Falling Angels is an amazing story: full of surprises, and alternating between horror and high comedy. It is rather as if Jayne Anne Phillips and Anne Tyler were holding the same pen…. This is a dazzling novel: shrewd, tragic and funny all at the same time.”
—Books in Canada
“Beautiful and life-affirming.”
—Quill & Quire
“Falling Angels is a stunning story of three sisters growing up in the sixties.”
—Edmonton Journal
“A breathtaking book.”
—Bavarian Radio, Germany
“[This] exquisitely written book is a horror story filled with poetry.”
—Freundin
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features
About the author
Author Biography
Select Awards
About the book
How Falling Angels Took Flight, by Liam Lacey
Read on
The Feral Side of Fiction: Reading (and Writing with) Barbara Gowdy, by Marni Jackson
Web Detective
An Excerpt from Mister Sandman, by Barbara Gowdy
About the Author
Author Biography
BARBARA GOWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.
Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.
Her first book, Through the Green Valley (a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published Falling Angels to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Falling Angels was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.
Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—Mister Sandman (1995), The White Bone (1998) and The Romantic (2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.
Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Romantic earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in Harper’s Magazine, singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”
Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel, Helpless, will be published by HarperCollins in 2007.
She lives in Toronto.
Visit the author online at www.barbaragowdy.ca
About
the Author
Select Awards
Barbara Gowdy received the prestigious Marian Engel Award in 1996, recognizing her contribution to Canadian literature.
We So Seldom Look on Love
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Mister Sandman
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Giller Prize
Named a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year”
The White Bone
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Giller Prize
Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
The Romantic
Nominated for the Man Booker Prize
Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
Finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book
Finalist for the Trillium Award
About the book
How Falling Angels Took Flight, by Liam Lacey
Falling Angels was made into a feature film in 2003. This article by Liam Lacey about the making of the film first appeared in The Globe and Mail on November 14, 2003.
There’s Lou, rebellious and superior; Sandy, pretty as a doll, naive and promiscuous; and Norma, the kind of girl who strives to please her parents. The story of Falling Angels is about three sisters—not the sisters of Chekhov, or the daughters of King Lear—but teenage girls growing up in the planned community of Don Mills, Ontario, in the late sixties. Barbara Gowdy’s breakthrough 1989 novel, Falling Angels, juxtaposed banal surfaces (suburbia, high-school gym classes) and wild events (infanticide, entrapment) in an eerie mix of black humour and catastrophe.
Falling Angels … was not Gowdy’s first book. That was Through the Green Valley, a conventional historical novel, published in 1988, about a 19th-century Irish family emigrating to the New World. The title wasn’t hers, and while she says “the research was impeccable,” this was not the kind of writing she wanted to do. With Falling Angels, published a year later, she found her writing voice.
“Inspired by Margaret Atwood’s example, she wrote a book set in the suburbs where she grew up and found … enough bizarre events for any potboiler.”
There was a prevailing belief in CanLit, she says, that “if writing is humorous, it can’t have depth.” Inspired by Margaret Atwood’s example, she wrote a book set in the suburbs where she grew up and found, within the constraints of middle-class Toronto life, enough bizarre events for any potboiler: A ► father who keeps his family confined in a fallout shelter; an infanticide; and a creepy ménage à trois between twin middle-aged men and a teenage girl.
“Gowdy had only one real requirement, according to Smith: ‘Keep my characters. ‘”
The novel was an international success and was optioned several times for film. Eight years ago, Vancouver director Scott Smith, then in the residency program at the Canadian Film Centre, first read the novel and fell in love with “the blend of calamity and humour.” He made inquiries about directing the film, but he was told he was too young (he was 25) and inexperienced.
Then came Kissed, Vancouver director Lynn Stopkewich’s 1996 film based on Gowdy’s short story about a young woman who works in a funeral parlour and loves a corpse. Stopkewich was slated to direct Falling Angels, but when she became sidetracked with a documentary on the Lilith Fair tour, she suggested Scott Smith would be a good choice. His first feature, Rollercoaster, showed his talents for working with young actors.
Producer Robin Cass, who optioned the book back in the mid-nineties and “had gone through several brick walls to get the film made,” was initially reluctant about Smith. Everyone felt the film should have a woman director.
“I said I’d be proud to have a sex change,” says Smith.
In the end, with Stopkewich vouching for Smith’s talents, the producers decided to go ahead. Screenplay writer Esta Spalding ( The Republic of Love) made some significant changes to the story, including turning Lou’s boyfriend, a John Lennon-ish English kid, into an American. Spalding also changed the ending to one that is more of a reconciliation.
Gowdy, who has been working on a screenplay herself for the past year with author and journalist Marni Jackson, knows that a movie and a novel “have completely different kinds of momentum.” Gowdy had only one real requirement, according to Smith: “Keep my characters.”
Gowdy says Smith captured not only the three girls (actresses Katharine Isabelle, Kristin Adams and Monté Gagné), but also the parents (played by Callum Keith Rennie and Miranda Richardson). As for the narrative changes, she appreciates that the visual imagination replaces the authorial interior monologue, which has certain narrative consequences.
Mostly, her reaction to the film is one of praise: “I’ve learned that getting a film made requires not one miracle but a series of them.”
Smith wanted to retain Gowdy’s main thematic concern, which is war—the war within the family, the Cold War in general and the Vietnam War in particular. Gowdy had once told Smith that the book was about what war did to men and men did to women. He saw it, more specifically, as being about a girl (Lou) recognizing her own role in perpetuating “the trap of war” that raged in her family. All of them are busy striving to appear normal, while hiding their family secret.
“Mostly, her reaction to the film is one of praise: ‘I’ve learned that getting a film made requires not one miracle but a series of them.’”
To find the right emotional tone, Smith was careful to be accurate to the period—from the girls’ school jumpers to ► the architecture of the homes—but also to create a heightened world. His colour palette consists of baby blue, rose and gold.
“One of Smith’s pet peeves is period pictures that look as though they were photographed with modern techniques.”
The exteriors are all brightly lit and look subtly but distinctly late sixties. There’s a good reason for that. One of Smith’s pet peeves is period pictures that look as though they were photographed with modern techniques.
So he looked around to get the right lenses. He found the Cooke camera lenses, which were state of the art in the late sixties. He was told the same camera lenses were used to shoot Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge.
Smith also wanted to find the right suburbia. Don Mills is now far too tree-lined to represent itself in 1968, and in any case, there were various tax-credit options available for shooting out West.
“We had the use of this new soundstage in Regina, and we thought we could shoot there. As soon as we got there, we saw the whole place was covered in trees—3,000 elms were planted there in the 1940s. All the interior scenes were shot in Regina. Fortunately, we heard that we might find the right neighbourhood in Moose Jaw and got another tax credit for shooting there.”
“It’s a place without shadows,” says Scott,“which is exactly what I wanted. Even the interiors are shot the same way. It’s the idea of something being hidden in plain sight.”
—Reprinted with permission from The Globe and Mail
Read on
The Feral Side of Fiction: Reading (and Writing with) Barbara Gowdy, by Marni Jackson
Marni Jackson presents an intimate glimpse of Barbara Gowdy’s writing life in her essay, which first appeared in Descant’s Spring 2006 issue, Entering the Other: The World of Barbara Gowdy.
Early in my friendship with Barbara Gowdy, I was a dinner guest at her apartment on Walmer Road. I think it was the one on Walmer Road—she’s moved eighteen times, so I’m not entirely sure. I was already a fan of We So Seldom Look on Love, which I found nervy, original, tender and comic. In particular, her care with language was stunning; each sentence felt resonant and solid, the way the door on an expensive car feels when you slam it.
“Barbara… has a mother-lion maternalism that kicks in whenever she comes to the defence of a friend, or a princip
le she believes in.”
I had brought along the sort of eager dinner-guest gift that perhaps says too much—a set of painted Russian nesting dolls, four varnished female figures, diminishing in size, right down to the tiniest peanut-sized one. I think it reflected my sense that Barbara contains many ages at once. She can be fifty, fifteen or five. With her dark, bright eyes, floating bangs and quick gestures, she still looks like the smartest girl in English class, hand up and waving, hoping the teacher will choose her first. At the same time, she has a mother-lion maternalism that kicks in whenever she comes to the defence of a friend, ► or a principle she believes in. One of these principles is the humane treatment of animals and other innocent creatures.
“I imagine that fictional characters, in their feral beginnings, can be as unruly, chaotic and unpromising as that cat.”
Barbara lives on the edge of a park in downtown Toronto, where she maintains a stewardly relationship with the urban animals that share her environment. Arthritic raccoons are lucky to slide down her eavestrough; they will be treated well. Her own housecat began life as an abused, abandoned, semi-feral animal that she rescued from the pound. But the cat kept pouncing on her feet and clawing at them, or scratching her face as she slept. Most of us would take the cat back, or at least cage it. Instead, Barbara caged herself; she had a special wrought-iron and glass curtain built for her doorless bedroom. In this way, the cat could have the run of the house at night, as cats prefer to do, while she remained sequestered.
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