If you’re a Toronto lover like me, you’re bound to enjoy and marvel over Michael Redhill’s novel Consolation (Anchor Canada, paperback), which delivers a gripping human story, elegantly and poetically told, along with a grittily realistic literary portrait of 1850s Toronto that is so well executed that it shines.
In alternating chapters, Consolation artfully knits together two separate views of Toronto in two different time frames – the city of today and the city of 150 years ago – without a hint of artifice. The novel moves contrapuntally between two dramatic stories with characters that, like those in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, seem to have unseen points of correspondence with one another across the gulf of time.
In the contemporary story, an urban archeologist discovers clues that lead him to believe a priceless cache of 1850s glass-plate photographs of Toronto may be retrieved from the harbour, where they sank in a fierce storm. The alternate story tells of a newly arrived British immigrant who, after the failure of his chemist’s shop, learns the art of photography from a dying colleague and begins capturing the rough-edged city as it emerges from the mud and miasmal bogs – creating those very photographs.
After the archeologist dies, his wife, daughter and daughter’s partner pursue his dream of retrieving the glass plates from an area of the former lake that has been topped up with landfill. A central locale in the story is a room in a lakefront hotel tower that overlooks an excavation where backhoes are feverishly uncovering the city’s forgotten past – an incidental part of digging the foundation for yet another modern tower.
The human relationships at the core of both halves of Consolation are real, complex and evolving. Much more than a treasure-quest unfolds in these pages. The book is equally about the characters’ inner lives and the exploration of new modes of living and loving after more traditional models fail.
Consolation bears affinities to Michael Ondaatje’s In The Skin of the Lion, which also fills its canvas with icons of old Toronto, and The English Patient, which also throws together a group of unlikely people as roommates with startling results. The book likewise bears comparison to Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, which conveyed a tale of 1840s Toronto with equal luminescence and, yes, grace.
Along with writers such as Anne Michaels, Howard Ackler and Ondaatje himself, Redhill is of the Ondaatje school of novel-writing. The prose is usually intensely poetic, relationships are always complex and dynamic, and the world is shown to be a place of infinite interwoven mystery. The narrative proceeds by way of revelations and removal of one obscuring skin after another. A New Yorker reviewer once said of Ondaatje’s writing that “it is so finely wrought as to be unreadable,” but Consolation is neither precious nor obscure: it is forthright and masterful as it attains a breathtaking level of realism and authenticity. With this book – his best so far – Redhill goes to the top of the class.
“If Consolation provokes Torontonians to look deeper at this place, if it causes their gaze to linger longer, then I’ll feel the book has burst its covers and gone out in the world to live in its readers. There’s nothing else a writer could ask for,” Redhill wrote in an online blog earlier this year.
Even after Consolation won last year’s City of Toronto book award, I delayed reading it for personal reasons. For years I’ve been attempting to write a novel set in 19th-century Toronto and didn’t want to be unduly influenced. Well, too late now. It’s a book that will stay with me.
Plucked from the ether, Consolation’s masterful portrait of mid-19th-century Toronto has emerged as magically as the sudden appearance of an image on a darkroom photographic plate. Kudos to the author for doing his homework so thoroughly and then applying his scholarship so invisibly in the service of this well-formed and gripping tale.
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Derek Hayes’ Historical Atlas of Toronto, a recent hardcover offering from Douglas & McIntyre, presents a different sort of love affair with the city of Toronto as it revives the city’s past through stunning full-colour maps, rare historical documents and rich stories.
The cover shows a stunningly detailed bird’s-eye view of the city of 1884, with a harbour full of steamers and sailing ships, and a cityscape bejewelled with many Victorian-era architectural gems since lost. (See William Dendy’s Lost Toronto for an inventory.) That Victorian map is also reproduced within, one of many that you can easily pore over for half an hour or more.
Colourful maps of historic Fort York, the Canadian National Exhibition and “new” suburban areas such as Rosedale, West Toronto Junction and Lawrence Park Estates, to name but a few, are supplemented with insightful notes and archival illustrations of buildings, people and streets. One delightfully illustrated map from the subway’s opening in 1955 offers a rare Jewish reference by pinpointing the location of Beth Tzedec Congregation on McCaul Street, just months before the inauguration of the new building on north Bathurst Street.
Those with an appreciation for the city’s history and growth will enjoy perusing this thorough and well-produced book.
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Offered in conjunction with a current museum exhibition of the same name at the Royal Ontario Museum, Mark Osbaldeston’s newly published Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been offers a compilation of building projects and schemes that – in many cases, thankfully – never saw the light of day. (Case in point: the Spadina Expressway, mercifully stopped at Eglinton.)
An unbuilt island tunnel, an unbuilt Queen Street subway, an unbuilt tower atop the former Eaton’s at College Park – these are among the dozens of unrealized architectural dreams revisited here.
In one 1945 scheme, Toronto’s modern city hall would have resembled one of those receding 1930s-style skyscrapers common in Buffalo and would have faced west toward Osgoode Hall and turned its back on Old City Hall.
This collection of “might have been” visions of Toronto reminds me of writer Robert Fulford’s apt phrase “accidental city” in describing the present urban reality. Unbuilt Toronto, the book, is published by the Dundurn Press; the exhibition remains on view until Jan. 11.