I remember when Vincent Lam’s first novel, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, was published a few years back. At the time, Lam was practising emergency medicine and the book reflected experiences at medical school. It received a lot of press and won the Scotiabank Giller prize in 2006. I was otherwise occupied with foolish pursuits and too busy to read the book, so it slipped past me. As penance, I thought I would read his latest novel, On The Ravine, a novel about drug addiction no doubt influenced by the fact that he is now practising addiction medicine. Penance aside, my chief motivation for reading the novel is the fact that the ravine of the novel’s title is Rosedale Valley which happens to run beneath the terrace where, in warmer weather, I pass many an afternoon reading novels like this one.
From my high perch, everything looks neat and tidy. The cars and cyclists running up and down Rosedale Valley Road look like toys, and a canopy of trees stretches north beyond the city, giving an impression of cleanliness. But a more granular gaze into the ravine offers a different impression. There’s a long wooden staircase running down to Rosedale Valley Road from the Mount Pleasant Road bridge. As you descend, you see underneath the bridge an accumulation of garbage, battered suitcases spilling old clothes, plastic water bottles, shoes, sleeping bags, and the ubiquitous blue masks tamped into the mud. As you walk down Rosedale Valley Road towards the Don River, you pass encampments hidden in the trees that grow up the slopes on either side of the road. Step off the trail and you’ll have to tread carefully to avoid discarded needles and tourniquets and condoms. In its wisdom, the Ford government chose to wage war on safe injection sites and the unintended but entirely predictable consequence was to shift drug use into the city’s network of ravines. I see evidence of it everywhere I look.
In her 2010 book, Imagining Toronto, Amy Lavender Harris produced a literary geography of Toronto and in it she gives much attention to the ravine as a defining feature of the city. There is life at street level, the life of suburban homes, of shops and commerce, of commuters on their way to work, of daylight shining on the pavement. But there is another life you can access only by descending below grade. Even at midday, the ravines can be shrouded in gloom and, incidentally, give people shelter from the gaze of surveillance cameras. It’s beside the point whether people actually use the ravines to gain cover for criminal activity; Amy Lavender Harris is more interested in how writers leverage this geographical feature to literary ends. Maybe the descent into the ravines echoes the Orpheus myth with its descent into Hades. Or maybe it suggests a Freudian unconscious state where unexpressed desires lurk; maybe it’s the natural home of the Id. Harris goes one further, citing the poet, Elana Wolff, who calls the ravine a “damp gash,” suggesting the image of female genitalia. As I take up Vincent Lam’s latest novel, I’m naturally curious to know if he plays upon the literary tropes that are emerging in the portrayal of Toronto’s landscape.
Early in the novel, Dr. Chen rides his bicycle across the Queen Street bridge where it spans the Don River and offers sterile supplies to users in a parkette on the other side. From there, he cycles north along the Lower Don Trail, under the Bloor Viaduct (most notably featured in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of the Lion) and past the Brick Works, now a community hub on reclaimed land. His destination is a colleague’s Rosedale house which backs onto a ravine, presumably Rosedale Valley. However, Lam omits proper names and the precise geography of Dr. Chen’s journey becomes vague. I’m not sure one can describe this as a fault; it’s more in keeping with a long and venerable tradition followed by writers who set their fiction in Toronto. I’m not sure why this is. Embarrassment? Self-deprecation?
A writer in New York City has no geographic reservations and so their character stands unselfconsciously on the corner of 5th Avenue and East 45th Street and fuck you for questioning their right to be there. But a writer in Toronto is apt to leave off the precise coordinates and insert a yellow taxi cab and try to pass off the scene as vaguely American the way they do in movies shot here. Despite the explosion of writers and artists living here, people still rub their eyes in disbelief and ask if Toronto is a real place with any right to exist except as a provincial stand-in for somewhere else. The consequence is that, as I read On The Ravine, which offers some clues that it’s set in Toronto—Dr. Chen lives in a condo in the Distillery District, he runs a clinic in Kensington Market—all the same, I have difficulty visualizing it. There’s nothing that lodges itself in my geographic imagination. Like so much of the city’s buildings raised in the New International style, Lam’s novel is sufficiently generic in tone and descriptors that it could be anywhere. When I climb with junkies up the slope to the Rosedale house of the “dealing doctor,” I want to smell the rotten leaves in the mud and push my way through the strangling dog vines, an invasive species that has taken root everywhere here; I want to pause in front of shrines to cyclists struck by cars racing down Rosedale Valley Road, note the faded photos and plastic flowers; I want to read the posters taped to utility poles asking if anyone has seen their brother/friend/lover who has gone missing, water seeping under the tape and obliterating the missing person’s eyes.
Maybe Lam’s geographic and descriptive vagueness has less to do with local tradition than with cognitive style. Despite my wordy pursuits, I’m a visual learner which means I encounter the world first through my eyes, and only afterwards through my other senses. It’s one of the reasons I carry a camera with me wherever I go; I love to frame a scene then take it home with me to savour (forgive the mixed metaphor). I don’t know Vincent Lam personally and so it may be presumptuous of me to speculate about his cognitive predilections, but I suspect they don’t quite line up with my own. Cognitive style may have some bearing on fictional approaches. A visual learner often apprehends a scene all at once, a gestalt, like a photograph. That poses challenges for spinning out a description that meets the linear demands of the written word. How do you translate multiple simultaneous stimuli into a single discursive line without making it seem chaotic and disjointed? Maybe Lam, on the other hand, leans more to an auditory learning style which makes it easier to sit through a lecture or listen to music; these linear modes of encountering the world lend themselves more readily to text spun out in a single line.
It should come as no surprise then that one of the principal characters, Claire, is a violinist. She had dislocated her shoulder and took opioids to cope with the pain. From there, she tumbled down a slippery slope that led to heroin and fentanyl and delivered her to Dr. Chen’s clinic in Kensington Market. Dr. Chen already knew her, or of her, because she played her violin once a week at a restaurant near his home in the Distillery District. Dr. Chen attended to the music. It spoke to him and, maybe more significantly, he could articulate why it spoke to him. I suspect that Lam, like his principal characters, has an appreciation for the arc of a musical line.
A good way to get at a novel is by comparing it to other novels. When I think of a novel that appeals to the visual imagination, I take as my paradigm Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano. It’s there in the title: the volcanic peaks of Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl dominate the landscape and accompany the reader from beginning to end. In the final chapter, Geoffrey Firmin meets his tragic end in, of all places, a ravine, which makes comparison here particularly apt. But a writer who strays to the other end of whatever spectrum I appear to be creating is Charles Dickens. When you read A Tale of Two Cities, for example, you don’t read the novel for its compelling descriptions of late 18th century London and Paris. You read it because you know that Dickens cleaves to a piercing moral vision that he brings to bear with critical weight upon the institutions of his day. He champions those marginalized by the predations of a nascent industrialism and, when he fears the reader might lose sight of his message, sheds subtlety for a more didactic tone. Almost every Dickens novel includes a character who stakes out the moral high ground and makes sure the reader understands the consequences of straying from that ground.
It is at this end of the spectrum, alongside Charles Dickens, that Vincent Lam sits most comfortably. His character, Dr. Chen provides a moral vision for the novel. He offers a model of compassionate care, listens without judgment to his patients, and refuses to cut corners when recruiting patients to new drug trials. If anything, Dr. Chen is too compassionate because his concern leads him to become too involved in the lives of his patients, especially Claire. And he is haunted by his failures, those people he couldn’t save, whose images he keeps on his cellphone as a reminder to proceed with humility. At the same time, the novel stands as an indictment of current law and order rhetoric that criminalizes drug use and uses that characterization to defund health care for addiction. The city has overtaken Lam and has only made his critique more pressing. With the pandemic, overdose deaths have escalated. Toronto Public Health reports that there were 545 confirmed overdose deaths in 2020, and 591 in 2021, up 100 percent from 2019. Similarly, homeless deaths have escalated with 187 in 2022 and peaking at 223 in 2021. Drug overdose accounted for nearly half of those deaths. This is precisely the stuff that brings a Dickensian novel into the world. As such, it may not necessarily be subtle, but it may still be necessary.