There was a time when fiction writers from Toronto were self-conscious about setting their stories in Toronto. Our city was too provincial to be real. It was urban enough, but had no credibility. It was still too close to its parochial roots. The answer to this self-consciousness was to strip descriptions of their particularity so readers might mistake them for apartments in New York City or police beats in Chicago. There were exceptions, of course. Hugh Garner didn’t worry about setting a detective pot-boiler in a cheesy Toronto suburb. And Michael Ondaatje took pains to describe the construction of the Prince Edward Viaduct. But there was a significant body of Toronto-based fiction that felt like Lego, generic enough that it could snap into place just about anywhere.
In the last decade or so, that attitude has changed. We proved that notwithstanding silly statements from Peter Ustinov, we enjoy all the lunacy of any other dysfunctional city. Our mayor made an ass of himself with racist remarks before embarking on an IOC-related junket to Kenya. One of Canada’s most notorious serial murderers began his career as a serial rapist in a Toronto suburb. A recent study revealed that Toronto has one of the longest commute times of any major city in the west (thoroughly debunking Ustinov’s comment about our Swiss efficiency). And our police have proven themselves just as effective at skull cracking as the best police forces in the American south. We even have our own infestations of bed bugs and rats. Toronto writers have no cause to be squeamish anymore. Our urban squalor squares with the best urban squalor anywhere.
The time has come, it seems, for Toronto to step up and be a major character in a novel. At least that’s how it feels in Michael Redhill‘s 2006 novel, Consolation. In an indirect way, Redhill offers an explanation for Toronto’s long-standing self-consciousness. The novel concerns a dying “forensic geologist” named David Hollis whose final monograph has made him the posthumous laughing-stock of his peers. He proposed that a cache of photographic plates from 1856 lie buried on the site for a new stadium (modeled on the Air Canada Centre) where a ship sunk in a storm and was subsequently buried by landfill. As excavation for the stadium footings proceeds, workers find the outline of a ship’s hull and the inevitable conflict arises. Do we honour the past and stop construction or bow to economic expediency and keep on digging? Near end of the novel, we have the observation that “[t]his whole place erases itself every day ….” As the image below illustrates, Toronto is in a permanent state of construction as new buildings obliterate sites where the old once stood. The explanation is that “[n]o one wants to hear the story of a whore’s childhood.” Better to forget and to move on. But as David Hollis’s daughter, Bridget, suggests: “Neglect of the past is a form of despair.” Toronto began its life as a colonial expedient; like a whore, it earned money for its masters back in London. So it is understandable that Toronto would have no great self-regard, at least in its early days. Just as Australia continues to labour under the story of its founding as a penal colony. Just as India and Kenya and scores of other countries continue to struggle with the vestiges of colonial identities.
One of the ways to assert ourselves is to nurture a culture of place, and we can do this through story. Bridget’s fiancé, John, undertakes such a story. David Hollis was dying of ALS and was determined to kill himself while he was still able. He had John drive him to the dock for the ferry to Hanlan’s point, and halfway across, he tumbled himself over the side and drowned. In effect, John assisted David’s suicide. John was further burdened by the knowledge that David’s final monograph was false. Whatever they were digging up at the construction site for the stadium, it had nothing to do with ships sunk in Toronto’s harbour or early photographic plates. As an offering to Bridget and her mother, John writes a story. He carefully researches life in Toronto from 1855-6 and imagines an apothecary newly arrived from London to expand the family business, but unable to compete with an established Scottish family, he learns the new art of photography. Redhill’s novel toggles between the two stories – the present-day Toronto of John and Bridget and Bridget’s grieving mother, and the colonial Toronto of Jem Hallam, druggist turned photographer.
As construction workers excavate the foundation of the new stadium, David’s widow, Marianne, moves into an adjacent hotel and takes a room overlooking the site. Rather than disabusing Marianne, John passes hours each day sitting with the woman, watching the hole in the ground deepen, nurturing the woman’s hope that her husband’s good name will be restored. It would seem that, here, consolation is indistinguishable from lying.
Can the converse also be said? Can David Hollis’ lie be construed as a kind of consolation? He lied about the existence of photographic plates sunken in Toronto’s harbour. Could that be a consolation for the city? A way to persuade the whore, all grown up now, that it has a rightful place in the world despite its ignominious beginnings?
I view this novel much as I view Toronto – trying awfully hard to be the real thing, but still terribly self-conscious.
Some noteworthy passages:
On belonging:
To belong in a place, one must hear the homecoming of birds: they suggest, in their innate wisdom, that wherever they alight is a place worth being in.
On Nathan Philips Square:
Two hundred metres to the east was the red-brick old city hall, downgraded now to a traffic court. It had been deemed unsuitable for the city of the sixties, which had built itself something that looked like a broken ice-cream cone with a tumour in the middle. The plaza was made up of wide, square concrete panes floating over an unseeable depth. The inch-wide cracks between the panes suggested that they were movable, that if you stood on the wrong one, you’d be sucked down into a tar pit that flowed under city hall.
On abandoned cemeteries:
Abandoned cemeteries presented fascinating opportunities for in situ casework: he’d ask them to determine the year of the last burial by comparing different stages of gravestone erosion and making calculations. All of this was actual geology, and by the third time he brought the same group out, they all came to within three years of the date of the last burial. Standing there, among the living, he felt the beautiful and numinous relationship of his young students to the community of these dead, whose last official moment they’d teased out of the silent witnesses to their lives.