Consolation

An interesting review

2008-03-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

While in Toronto last month, I met a lot of people who had interesting points of view on Consolation, and I enjoyed some genuinely engaging and profound discussions about the book. No author can hope for that, so I'm still sort of glowing about it all, and full of gratitude.

This kind of engagement you expect least of all from book reviewers, who usually just want to tell you if they liked or disliked a book without actually discussing what might lie beneath the surface. However, I've learned of a review from a site called "Pop Matters"; the review is of the American hardcover, which was published 18 months ago and was reviewed in fewer than five media outlets in the US. You can find the review here—the fact that it's positive is nice, but I also think this is the first review of Consolation that attempts at all to grapple with the issues in the book, and so I'm taking the unusual step of not ignoring a book review, which is generally my policy. Hope you find it interesting.

One Book

2008-02-07T21:12:00.000-08:00

I'm writing from the far side of exhaustion on my last night in Toronto, but while I still have a soupçon of wakefulness in me, I want to put down a few notes. I'll post more observations about the week and the events I participated in when I get back home.

The most pressing observation to make, however, is what a unique experience it was to meet, at last, Consolation's readers, the ones the book was intended for. If you attended any of the events in Toronto, you might have heard me say that the novel, when it was first published, fell on deaf ears. That was a difficult experience, because if the ones you're talking to don't hear you (or are not aware you're actually speaking to them, which is a better image, since Consolation, when it was published suffered from, shall we say, a low profile), it makes you wonder if it was worth speaking in the first place.

This week in Toronto, with One Book, I finally felt that the book had reached its intended audience, and it was immensely gratifying to meet Torontonians who were reading this book and taking away from it a sense that there was something underneath and behind the cityscape they live in. 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.

I'll try, in the coming couple of weeks, to give a fuller report on what a week home in the snow among book-lovers was like, but for now I just want to thank everyone for coming out (sometimes in truly awful weather) and especially everyone at the Toronto Public Library. Chief among whom I thank Tina Srebotnjak, who was in at least three places at once at all times this week. I know this, because she was with me almost all the time.

Until I can post again, be sure to check out the Toronto Public Library's Book Buzz page. You can post your impressions of Keep Toronto Reading, or of Consolation, and you can also post your questions there. I'll be checking in semi-regularly to answer them.

But for now, thank you all, and good night.

Coming home

2008-01-28T00:53:00.000-08:00

I've been living in the south of France for almost six months now, in a city called Narbonne, and as a life-long Torontonian, it's been fascinating to live somewhere else for long enough to get used to it. I, my partner, and our two sons will be here until at least the end of 2008, and I'd had no intention to come home ... at least not until the Toronto Public Library chose Consolation as their inaugural "Keep Toronto Reading One Book" read. And now, in the midst of this south-of-France dream, I'm going home to Toronto. In February. Thanks TPL.

Joking aside, it's going to be interesting to see Toronto again after six months of being steeped in a place where history is not something people struggle to save. If you go digging in your backyard here and turn up a chunk of 2000-year-old Roman amphora, there's no museum in the country that's going to take it. It's yours, and you can feel free to serve olives on it or put it up on your wall, and if you're a Canadian fellow with a hankering for the past, you just might. But if you're your average local, you're tossing it on the pile with the rest of the amphorae chunks, and bits of bone and crockery and what-have-you that is a veritable layer of the soil down here.

One of the questions in Consolation is how a place, once inhabited, figures out what parts of its physical legacy is important for the future. And the illusion in a place like the one I'm in now is that they always knew what to preserve. From the perspective of a temporary inhabitant of Narbonne in 2008, it sure seems that way. And yet, when this place was still young (600 years old as opposed to nearly 2100) there was a Roman wall that had served its purposes. So they tore it down and used the stone in the church, in houses, in municipal buildings, some of which have also vanished, their stone redistributed. Imagine the uproar today if that wall were still standing and someone suggested tearing it down for use in the new community centre? And yet, in the Narbonne of A.D. 600 (when it was three times as old as Toronto is now), an already ancient Roman wall was not important enough for them to preserve.

So how do we Torontonians, as citizens of a still-new city, manage to make the right decisions for the city's future citizens? How can we know what is important? I ask these questions without knowing the answers, and at the same time, I ask them as a citizen who has felt the pain of loss, looking around the place I live in, as parts of our city's heritage are eroded to serve the needs of the immediate present. At least the church they built here in Narbonne using some of the stone from that Roman wall is still standing 1500 years later! A building like that was made to serve permanence, but I have to wonder, gazing on some of the development in our city, what gods those buildings will serve. Is a sense of place being created in Toronto for those who will come after us?

I'm absolutely delighted to be a part of the Toronto Public Library's Keep Toronto Reading program for 2008. If the week of February 4, when I'll be in town to do events (see my schedule here), is anything like the LongPen launch we had last week while I was still in France, it's going to be a blast. I can't promise the mayor will be at everything (although, gosh, he should be), or that I'll be signing books on a computer tablet from 4000 miles away, but I'm pretty sure the company will be good. I hope you'll all welcome home a wandering son of the city and that we'll talk about Toronto's past and future, as well as its stories. And of course I hope it snows 100 centimetres while I'm there, because it's the least I deserve for the life I'm leading now (which, if you're curious, you can read about here ...)

Post-Booker

2007-09-07T05:29:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure this blog gets any traffic -- it's awfully hard to find -- but here are a few thoughts for those of you who might be interested in what it was like to be a Booker longlistee ...

A wild month of bewildered anticipation ended yesterday with the news that Consolation has won the 2007 Toronto Book Award and, at the same time, did not make the cut for the Man Booker shortlist. As you can imagine, it was quite a strange day.

Prizes are weird things for writers. Most of us don't write to be nominated or to win prizes, and yet it's impossible not to be aware of the huge (and ever-increasing) group of honours that our books are considered for. So after what is often years of private labour, the public life of a book runs the gauntlet of not only reviewers and readers (where its longevity is usually decided), but it is also filtered through the machinery of prize-making and prize-giving, and these are sometimes the most gut-wrenching phases of a book's (and its author's) life.

Most writers I know say that they fear and desire these honours about equally, and I would agree with them. We write primarily to reach others, but when we reach them, we'd rather be loved over the altenative. Awards are a public form of this yearned-for love, but most of us know coveting prizes is bad for us as writers. For one thing, it transforms us from strange neurotic people who operate mainly in private, to people who must try not to act strange and neurotic in public. It's surprising how many of us there are who can put together a pretty decent sentence on the page but who, when speaking publicly, can get to looking (in Orwell's memorable phrase) like a monkey on a stick.

But today, of all days, I should probably be a monkey on a stick for at least a few moments before getting back to real life. Because there were so many of you who sent your love and good wishes and both congrats and consoling words today, so for those of you I haven't said it to directly: thank you. There are very fews days where you go from joy to anxiety to brief sadness to relief all between sun-up and sundown and it was good to have friends and loved ones to share it with. I have to say though that it's the joy and relief that are sticking with me. My god, what an incredible ride, but freaking hell, I'm glad it's over.

The old blog contents ...

2007-08-14T07:44:00.000-07:00

Some background and acknowledgements

If you're here because you've read Consolation, you might be interested in some of the factual background to the novel. Some matters in the book are attributed incorrectly for the purposes of fiction, but here are some sources for them ...

Lord John Simcoe’s first parliament buildings, located approximately at the crossroads of Toronto’s contemporary Front and Parliament streets, is depicted in the novel as having been uncovered by David Hollis. In the real world, this actually happened in 2002, but the site was mapped and colocated by the archeologist Dr. Ron Williamson, with the support of Rollo Myers and the architectural firm of Brown & Storey. Dr. Williamson successfully deduced the location of the parliament and dug it up almost to the exact inch in the back of a carwash. Neither the mayor of the city at that time, nor any of his councillors would come and see this signally important find, and so the site was filled in within a week. At the time of this writing, the current mayor, David Miller, has expressed an interest in the site, but so far it remains covered over.

The panorama described in chapter seven of the novel is a real photograph, and was taken in thirteen parts in the early winter of 1857 by the firm of Armstrong, Beere, and Hime. This picture was lost until 1984, when it was rediscovered in the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices in London by Joan Schwartz. It can be found in its entirety, with an indispensible commentary, in William Dendy’s book Lost Toronto.

The buried boat depicted in the book was inspired by the discovery of the Commodore Jarvis during the excavation of the Air Canada Centre in 1997. A thorough description of the find, along with some maps and photographs, can be found on pp 44-47 of "The Archaeological Master Plan of the Central Waterfront City of Toronto, Ontario," prepared by Toronto's Archeological Services, Inc in 2003. You can view the entire document here.
The discovery of the boat inspired the poem below this post.

I'd also like to acknowledge Toronto's Harbour Castle Hilton hotel for access to the room that would have looked out on the site described in the book.

"Commodore Jarvis"

Lakes too, bearing up the clumsy steamers,
cheap galleons filled with lumber, fish, wood
for caskets. 1875. The city seeped forward - this July
they found the Commodore Jarvis rotting under the expressway
tore up its ash and dust for a new stadium. On its last trip,
it put in at the Yonge Street Pier, unloaded
apples from New York state, trout from Vermont.
Then they invented basketball. Mackenzie King
vied for control of the city's new electrics.
Charlie Conacher and Busher Jackson walked up Church
in their overcoats, lost to Detroit, walked home.
After a few years, radios started to get smaller,
they tore down the tall red trade centre
at Front and Yonge. My grandfather was born
across the ocean and they named him Israel. That same year
a boy from Corktown fell through the ice.
Hockey on lake Ontario. He lies there now,
undiscovered, or else
is beneath the foundation of a downtown hotel,
buried under landfill, under progress. He might be
preserved like the silvered bog men they found
in Scotland, his skin tight across his bones
his ribs rounded under the leather coat like
streetcar tracks mounded with snow.

Bibiliography

The following is a more-or-less complete bibiliography for Consolation. In addition to the below, many contemporary newspaper sources were used, chief among them the Globe from 1853 to 1857, and the Leader, from the same era. Both were newspapers were published in Ontario. Many contemporary maps were consulted as well.

Book titles in bold denote some of the novel's more important sources.

Toronto, history and architecture

“A Member of the Press”. The Hand-Book of Toronto. Toronto: Lovell and Gibson; 1858
Andre, John. Infant Toronto as Simcoe’s Folly. Toronto: Centennial Press, 1971
Andre, John. William Berczy: Co-founder of Toronto. Toronto: Centennial Press, 1967
Arthur, Eric and Otto, Stephen A. Toronto: No Mean City, 3rd edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986
Careless, J.M.S. Toronto, An Illustrated History to 1918. Toronto: Lorimer, 1984
Clark, C. S. Of Toronto the Good: The Queen City of Canada as it is. Toronto: The Toronto Publishing Company, 1898
Corelli, Rae. the toronto that used to be. Toronto: Toronto Star Limited, 1964
Dendy, William. Lost Toronto (2nd edition). Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993
Dendy, William and Kilbourn, William. Toronto Observed: Its Architecture, Patrons, and History. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1986
Filey, Michael. A Toronto Album. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970
Firth, Edith G. The Town of York, A Collection of Documents of Early Toronto. Two volumes, 1793-1815, and 1815-1834. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962 and 1966
Goheen, Peter G. Victorian Toronto, 1850 to 1900. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970
Guthrie, Ann. Don Valley Legacy: A Pioneer History. Boston Mills: The Boston Mills Press, 1986
Hoffman, Frances and Taylor, Ryan. Much To Be Done: Private Life in Ontario from Victorian Diaries. Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1996
Hounsome, Eric. Toronto in 1810. Toronto: Coles Publishing Co, 1975
Hutcheson, Stephanie. Yorkville in Pictures, 1853 to 1883
McHugh, Patricia. Toronto Architecture: A City Guide. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985
Middleton, Jesse Edgar. Toronto’s 100 Years. Toronto: The Corporation of the City of Toronto, 1934
Morton, Desmond. Mayor Howland: The Citizens’ Candidate. Toronto: Hakkert, 1973
Mulvaney, Pelham. Toronto: Past and Present. Toronto: W. E. Caigher,1884
Parsons, Jennifer and Lilliman, Kevin. Toronto 1837: A Model City. Toronto: The Town of York Historical Society, 1995
Robertson, John Ross. Landmarks of Toronto, six volumes. Toronto: The Toronto Evening Telegram, 1894-1914
Scadding, Henry. Toronto of Old. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966
Taylor, Conygham Crawford. Toronto Called Back. Toronto: W. Briggs, 1886
Thompson, Samuel. Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer. Hunter, Rose & Co, 1884
Walker, Frank N. Sketches of Old Toronto. London: Longmans, 1965
Victorian Canada
Abrahamson, Una. Domestic Life in Nineteenth Century Canada. Toronto: Burns & MacEachern, 1966
Smith, William H. Smith’s Canadian Gazetteer. Toronto: H & W Rowsell, 1846

Victorian Life

Altick, Richard D. Victorian People and Ideas. New York: Norton, 1973
Chesney, Kellow. The Victorian Underworld. New York: Schocken Books, 1970
George, M. Dorothy. London Life in the Eighteenth Century. London: Capricorn, 1965
MacKenzie, John M, editor. The Victorian Vision. London: V & A Publications, 2001

Medical matters

Johnson, Laurence, A.M., M.D. A Medical Formulary Based on United States and British Pharmocopaeias Together with Numerous French, German, and Unofficial Preparations. New York: William Wood & Co, 1881
Hodgson, Barbara. In The Arms of Morpheus. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2001
Various contributors. Living with ALS, in four volumes. The ALS Association, 2002

Photography

Bajac, Quentin. The Invention of Photography. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002
Buckland, Gail. Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. Boston: David R. Godine, 1980
Burnett-Brown, Anthony, Gray, Michael, and Roberts, Russell. Specimens and Marvels: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. New York: Aperture, 1995
Clarke, Graham. The Photograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997
Isenburg, Matthew R. “The Making of a Daguerreotype” (pamphlet) 2001
Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997
Richter, Stefan. The Art of the Dageurreotype. London: Viking, 1990
Rinhart, Floyd and Marion. American Miniature Case Art. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1969

This is the new Consolation blog

2007-08-14T07:39:00.000-07:00

Folks, I'm not sure what happened with "redhillconsolation" except that, er, it's been taken over somehow by porn. Not exactly what I'd intended. I'm sorry.

Some people may be seeking out this blog now that Consolation has been longlisted for the Booker prize, so I'm putting up the text that used to be at the other place for people to look at again. I had intended this blog to be a static information spot, but I may come back and write a few thoughts down on the Booker. Then again, I may not. I have another blog, which records our adventures in France -- it's here, and it's probably more interesting than anything I'd have to say about the Booker!

Sorry for all the confusion ...

Michael