One Book: Consolation
May 19th, 2008
To finish off my thoughts about reading Michael Redhill’s novel Consolation, I’d like to look at a theme explored in depth in the later part of the narrative — the …
May 18th, 2008
Back in February, Spacing writers posted a series of explorations and ruminations based on reading Michael Redhill’s Toronto-based novel Consolation, as part of the Keep Toronto Reading “One …
March 11th, 2008
CBC Toronto reporter Mike Wise kept his own One Book blog during the month of February. It’s worth a visit to get his take on how the book mixes with …
March 3rd, 2008
The docks are two hundred and forty feet out from the lake’s original shoreline. Landfill pushed everything forward. Buildings erupted out of it like weeds. The city, walking on water.
- p.2, …
February 28th, 2008
John and Bridget were living together in a part of town called Riverdale. David had educated them (whether they wanted to be or not) in the history of their neighbourhood. He explained to them that at the turn of the century, when the land to the east of the Don River and its deep, almost impassable valley was first developed, the acres of thick forest gave themselves up reluctantly to cutters and road-layers. Access south to the lake was not as direct here as it was from the middle of town, and the promontories not as pleasant. A road had been cut in the valley, but if you wished to live in Riverdale, your horses had to be strong for the uphill slogs to and from town. It was said that if you stood at Yonge and King Streets at nightfall you could hear the curses of the tanners and the coopers and the housewifes beating their way back into the dark part of town.
I first read this passage on the streetcar heading east. Looking up from my book, I realized we would soon effortlessly cross the Don River valley. I couldn’t help but laugh, and not just because of the coincidence, or because in the past my neighbourhood might have been known as the “dark part of town.†I chuckled because despite the ease with which people on the west side of the Don can now travel to the east side, the valley still seems to act as a hurdle, even if it’s more of a psychological hurdle than anything else. In the maps of Toronto that many of us draw up in our minds, Riverdale is often situated much further east than it is in real life.
Back in the 1800s, the Don Valley marked Toronto’s eastern edge. Spacing editor Anna Bowness pointed this out in her One Book post on the Necropolis graveyard, which sprawls down the west side of the valley near Riverdale farm and was at one time situated on the outskirts of the city. There are other clues that also betray the river’s days as the city’s eastern border. Take the Don Jail, which sits near Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street. “When the Don Jail was built in 1865, it existed at the far Eastern edge of a fledgling city,†wrote Joe Wilson in Spacing’s Water issue. “The river provided a natural Eastern boundary, which law enforcement officials rarely crossed. North of the Jail was a notorious squatter camp known as Brook’s Bush, populated with escaped convicts and people wishing to remain outside the law.†It must have made people feel safer to know that Toronto’s convicts were on the other side of an “almost impassable valley.â€
February 26th, 2008
He walked west along Queen Street, away from the centre of town. On the northwest corner of University and Queen sat a little building called Campbell House. It occupied a postage stamp of grass and looked out on nothing that had been there when its lawns had been laid. At some point in the past, some cherishing landowner, now dead, had fought off the parcelling of his little estate to an interest of some kind. Maybe a tiny hermit’s cabin on his grounds had been put forth as hallowed, a place the loss of which would spell an end of something important. That battle was lost, of course, as so many battles to save buildings had been lost in this city, and it was worse in all directions from that place where a little blot of history in the form of a house still remained. Buildings raised in the fifties thundered up in places where there were once familiar landmarks: toll booths, favourite old shops, cooperages with big working grounds under which lay the bodies of horses loved and worked to death.
In this passage, John, one of the main characters in the book’s modern story, is inspired by the sight of a very old Toronto house preserved amidst more modern buildings to think bitterly about the loss of history and sense of place in a young and constantly transforming city like Toronto. It is one of the major themes of the book.
The reference to Campbell House, however, makes this passage is a lot more complicated than the simple nostalgic rant that it looks like at first sight.
In John’s mind, the house and its lot seems to be a sign of rare historical stability and resistance, a grounded sense of place that contrasts with the constant change around it. Indeed, Campbell House is one of the oldest buildings in Toronto, built in 1822.
But the irony is that the house was built in a different part of town, and was moved in one piece to its present location in 1972, in a highly public and dramatic operation, in order to preserve it. The history of solid landownership John imagines for this house and plot of land is exactly that, imaginary.
The passage suggests that John is an unreliable narrator, not fully knowledgeable about the Toronto history that he seeks to protect, and that we should take his opinions with a grain of salt. In one way, the real history of Campbell House suggests that the situation is even worse than he imagines. Even this seeming example of stability amidst change is, in fact, out of place, detached from the original location and context where it acted and created memories in the city’s history. The difficulty of keeping a sense of place in Toronto is thus even worse than he imagines. At the same time, the real story undermines his rant about Toronto’s neglect of its history, because Campbell House was an early example of many different people in Toronto consciously coming together to save a historic building, rather than an eccentric individual effort as he imagines, and it helped set in motion a movement to save historical buildings in Toronto that had been active and sometimes successful for a quarter century before 1997, the year in which John is thinking these thoughts.
February 20th, 2008
“There are a couple of boarded-up houses on Elm Street, just near Bay,” said Bridget. She came over sat on the bed beside her mother. Marianne covered her daughter’s hand with her own. “He got permission from the city to go into one of them. The windows were covered in wood, but he had a flashlight. There was still carpet inside, and wallpaper on the walls — this embossed wallpaper with flowers. Dark squares where people had hung pictures.”
- from Consolation, by Michael Redhill, page 444
Toronto is a hotbed for urban exploration. Infiltration, “the zine about going places you’re not supposed to go,” was the brainchild of a Torontonian, the late Jeff Chapman (a.k.a Ninjalicious). There are presently 86 locations listed in our city’s thread of the Urban Exploration Resource (UER) database, including the Canada Linseed Oil Mills building near Dundas and Roncesvalles, the ruins of Christ Church St. James in Little Italy, and the Old Don Jail. Most locations have multiple picture galleries, which are uploaded by the site’s many registered users. While some images (those of the jail, for example) were collected during Doors Open Toronto or other such legitimate tours and events, many were taken without permission or invitation, by ordinary people with extrordinary nerve and an unquenchable thirst for a sneak peek behind the boarded-up windows of our built history.
Abandoned structures are probably best described as public space grey areas, but unfettered access to these locations is a pretty black-and-white issue, depending on who you ask. For many exploration advocates, houses are a grey area within a grey area; they’re more personal, more private than a dilapidated factory or an underground drainage system. But when I read in Consolation about the character David Hollis traipsing (though with permission) through an old house at Bay and Elm streets, I became determined to take a look for myself.
February 13th, 2008
David pointed to where a pedestrian bridge spanned the Bayview Extension. “That was the edge of town for sixty years – the necropolis is right behind those trees. And you go down here†– his arm tracked slowly south – “and that was the middle of town. I guess it still is. Generally, you moved into the necropolis by the time you were fifty-five. That was old age. That makes me a lucky man, doesn’t it?â€
- from Consolation, by Michael Redhill, page 145
Editor’s Alert: Some early plot details revealed in this post.
Consolation is a book about hope and optimism and forward-looking bravery, and so on, but first it is a book about death. Death comes in with the title and stays throughout the book; it looks over David Hollis’s shoulder as he confronts ALS, it haunts his surviving family, and it courts every character in the desolate, squalid muck of early Toronto. So it’s fitting that Consolation’s geography is full of ghosts: two graveyards – Potter’s Field and the Toronto Necropolis – make repeat appearances throughout the book.
In the passage above, David Hollis takes a fateful drive with his prospective son-in-law, John, and acts as a wistful tour guide as they head south through the city. David is dying; he is on his way to die, and his speech to John is an elegy to the city he lived for. He describes a city long gone – the Toronto of the mid-19th century – and its ghosts hover over the landscape as the two men drive through it. He points to the necropolis, a picturesque graveyard on the edge of Cabbagetown , which looms above the river, where the city used to stop.
The necropolis was the city’s second non-sectarian cemetery; the first was the York General Burying Ground, sometimes called the “Strangers’ Burying Ground,†but known most familiarly as Potter’s Field. A six-hectare plot of land, Potter’s Field opened in 1826 in anticipation of a population boom and of an assortment of scourges such as smallpox, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis. At the time of its purchase, Potter’s Field was at the edge of town, at least a mile north of the nearest building. We know the area today as the corner of Yonge and Bloor.
February 12th, 2008
A man is standing by the lakeshore at Hanlan’s Point ferry dock. Cicadas in the grass near the roadway, cars passing behind the hotel. The ferry rush hour is over already at 8:15, and the Hanlan’s Point ferry is the least frequent of them all, as it takes passengers to a buggy, unkempt part of the Toronto Islands. But it is the most peaceful ride, ending close to wilderness.
Consolation, page 1
The Hanlan’s Point ferry is the best ferry. It isn’t romantic and “olden-times” looking like the Centre and Wards Island boats — it’s made of big pieces of industrial steel and designed to support trucks and cars and dates back to the late Diefenbaker days, but doesn’t have any of the sharp and suave leopard-skin pillbox hat style usually associated with that era. There is little embellishment or extraneous comforts on The Oneida, and the ambulatory and two-wheeled passengers often have to find space to stand in between the big truck tires and trailers that haul canoes and food or even roadies and gear for Virgin Fest.
It’s a privileged view of the working underbelly of what makes the Toronto Islands tick, akin to taking a walk down the service road behind Disney World. There is certainly some satisfaction in walking past the huge crowds with their kids, coolers and strollers waiting to head to Centre Island on summer days, it a land of manicured lawns and Trudeaumania era planters and fountains. The Hanlan’s waiting area is never as crowded, and there is shade and even benches, and you get to enjoy that mildly-smug feeling of knowing the better way to the island. Once on the ferry, you get the most magnificent Toronto skyline pass-by this side of a late night drive along the Gardiner Expressway. You can stand still on the ferry deck and watch the buildings of various distance shift between each other as you move west. In the superhotsun and dizzy smog you might almost think it’s some kind of Proustian Remembrance of Things Past episode, where you can see all the Toronto skylines at once. Other times it’s just Toronto and it looks good.
As Redhill says, the ferry arrives at the buggy, unkempt part of the island. This being in Toronto, all is relative and unkempt is still fairly well kempt and the bugs somewhat reasonable unless it is dusk or the few weeks in the summer when the flies decide to bite and take chunks of your naked flesh with them. The cut grass here is not as golf-course perfect as it is on Centre Island, where (late parks commissioner) Tommy Thompson’s famous “Please Walk On The Grass” signs are located. Island guests are greeted by the massive statue of old ripped-ab Ned Hanlan, champion rower of the 1880s, clad (as the precise prose of Wikipedia currently states) “only in surprisingly revealing trunks.” Nearby is one of the Massey Medal -winning polygonic pavilions that dot the western half of the island, its concession stand open in the summer and staffed by an often lonely but relaxed looking attendant.
February 11th, 2008
They did not have the benefit of Mr. Ennis’s skylight to effect the passage of light into the room, but the front south-facing window was almost as good. A series of three mirrors brought light in off the street and into the middle of the shop. … Being indirect, it was softer light, and exposures were longer and therefore more uncertain.
from Consolation, by Michael Redhill, page 343
This passage, in which some of the book’s characters are trying to establish a photography studio in a shopfront in 1856 Toronto, brings to the fore the essential role that natural light played in building and city design at the time, and still does today.
At a time when artificial light was either weak (candles) or very expensive (gaslight), the maximization of natural light in a building was vital to its success. I remember a walking tour of Parkdale a couple of years ago, where the guide pointed out that most of the original Victorian retail properties were along the north side of the street, facing south, so that the goods in the storefront interior would get the most extended possible visibility through the sunlight coming through their large windows. On the south side of the street many of the buildings were not retail, but rather workshops and factories, which were not so concerned with visibility at the front of the building (they got their sun from their rear windows).
When I interviewed Ward 20 Councillor Adam Vaughan for an article about the Queen West Heritage District, he suggested that one of the reasons why preserving Victorian buildings is valuable is that they had developed a range of techniques for managing natural light and its energy efficiently — techniques that we can learn about and bear in mind as we try to move towards a more sustainable, less energy-intensive future.
