The Flood

A languid but often hilarious and rich-as-cream Irish comedy about three elderly women and a greedy innkeeper who get hoodwinked by a crafty Englishman. It's June 1933, and the peaceful southern Irish town of Bridgeford is both shocked and amused when a snooty Englishman, Mr. Hector Slyne, arrives, puts up at the local hotel, and spreads the word that he's offering 60 pounds an acre for certain parcels of marshland on the banks of the River Shannon - the poor fool, apparently unaware that the Shannon floods half the year, wants to build holiday cottages in the bogs. The chief benefactors of this crazy Englishman are three elderly and impoverished women: the eccentric Mrs. Hosannah Braiden; Miss Sarah Jane McLurry, owner of the local sweet shop; and the astonishing Miss Pig, the town's aptly named purveyor of crubeens, or pig's feet. Acting as a middleman for the women (and a landowner himself) is innkeeper Benny O'Farrell. The four don't enlighten Slyne as to the Shannon's watery extravagances, and make their deal happily - but not before the hated Slyne ups and marries the prize catch of the town, the beauteous Maud Daly, daughter of the local hotel-keeper. It's only much later, when the townsfolk learn that there are plans afoot to drain the Shannon's low-lying areas, that the four former landowners realize all is not as it seems. Irish writer Broderick (The Rose Tree, A Prayer for Fair Weather) is wonderfully, wittily, and wisely at home in this crafty/folksy comic milieu. The narrative is a little slow at the start, the dialect a little heavy, but one does meet a delightful cast of characters, including ace cook Mrs. Flaherty Flynn, the only woman in Ireland who can "make dead meat rise again." (Kirkus Reviews)