Michael Redhill' s novel of Toronto history, Consolation, has made the not-too Long List (13 titles) for this year's Booker Prize.
It's good to hear. Redhill has been, so far, a writers' writer, more respected than famous. Attention from a prominent international prize should add a much-deserved fillup to his readership and reputation.
I didn't blog about Consolation when it was new last winter. The review I would have given it was, well, mixed, and I didn't feel like carping about a book getting too little attention. But now it's a star.
Deservedly. It's beautifully written; the sections about a contemporary family dealing with one of its members dying of ALS are powerful and insightful. That story is set against historical sections dealing with a moment of Toronto's past that deeply engages the dying man. The lost, buried history of the city is itself a character in the novel.
A druggist-photographer of the 1850s may have compiled a panorama of Toronto in photographs; the dying man bequeaths to his family his search for where the glass negatives may lie buried. Much of the novel concerns this photographer and the mid-1850s Toronto he lives in.
Except Redhill's mid-1850s Toronto seemed maddeningly and consistently wrong to me. It's really an 1820s Toronto: small, crude, surrounded by looming and threatening woods, buried in snow, and absolutely isolated from the world for most of the year. The isolation and oppression of the place are crucial to the solitude in which Redhill places his lonely, half-mad photographer. They are also crucial to the plot. The photographer 's whole situation changes when he happens to corner the market in photographic supplies during Toronto's long winter isolation.
But mid-1850s Toronto was anything but isolated. It had railroads, it had telegraphs. It was a big busy ambitious place, nothing like the grim, dead village Redhill evokes so powerfully. The photographer would not have been cut off from contact with his family in Britain, and he could never have held a monopoly in silver nitrate for months on end.
Now I don't think historical novels are on oath. Novels have to work as novels, and a novelist's right to play with history is absolute. It's a novel; it's made up. Slaughterhouse-5 is a terrific novel of history; I think A Knight's Tale is a terrific historical movie. Neither gives a damn about narrow footnoted accuracy.Lots of the history in Ondaatje and Urquhart -- to name two very historically sensitive novelists -- can be quibbled with.
But I heard the novelist Fred Stenson, author of the historical novel The Trade, talking of his novelistic practice this summer. He said (I'm paraphrasing what I recall) a reliable historical context is like a matrix in which one sets one tale. And if you stretch and bend the matrix in a historical novel, you sail into trouble. Or, to switch the metaphor, you make the ground unstable underneath you.
I like Stenson's point. And that's where I was uneasy reading Consolation. Michael Redhill is free to shape his setting as he needs. But as I read Consolation, I felt, well, disoriented by its sense of history, and that shaped my response to the novel.
'Course, the Brits on the Booker jury won't have a clue about any of this. Redhill could probably have set his small isolated frontier-outpost Toronto in the 1920s without setting off any concerns from them. Go, Michael Redhill.
(More confirmation for my longtime observation: history is what you have to engage if you want to be a serious Canadian novelist.)
