Urban Solace

“Good novels should not answer questions,” Elie Wiesel once said. “They should deepen the questions.” After reading Cities of Refuge, one is left with the sense that human beings are much deeper, more complex and mysterious than they often appear to be. Michael Helm asks the big questions that weigh ordinary people down and bear them forward. And he does so in prose that could be called graceful.

Let me state simply that this is one of the finest books I have read in recent years. It interested me initially because so much of the book is set within the context of the world of refugees in the city of Toronto. This is a world I know well. However, it soon became clear to me that Cities of Refuge is about far more than refugees.

At first glance, the title seems to indicate that this is a work of non-fiction, a survey of those cities that have designated themselves as “cities of refuge,” open to refugees in need of protection. Several cities in Europe have done this and it has become a movement that has gathered some steam. However, a tiny line on the cover of the book notes that this is “a novel.” It is a novel in which the city of Toronto is a major actor.

Within this city the characters live and move and have their being. It is the city Jane Jacobs loved, the city of neighbourhoods, of people who are located and dislocated, of common spaces where lives intersect on a daily basis. In Michael Helm’s book, Toronto is the space where the personal meets the political, where those who have been here a long time meet the newcomers, strangers from distant lands and different cultures. The city is the in-between space in which the familiar and the foreign interact. “A city is like a primary text,” in which “everything is connected.”

The book opens with a violent attack on Kim, a 28-year-old woman who works at the museum and spends time volunteering at an organization called GROUND, which helps refugees in danger of being deported. The attack forces her to try to remember what she would like to forget, an effort most refugees are also forced to make. The assault pushes Kim to the edge of deep fear and back to her father’s grey past.

For Kim, as for all of the characters in the book, something has happened that leaves a permanent scar. They can never return to the self they once were. Her efforts to heal reveal the limits of therapy. She tries to imagine the person who attacked her, only to reject this image once she realizes that it is more alive for her than the featureless undocumented attacker who hangs around the edges of the story but is never revealed.

The attack also strikes at the heart of her father Harold, a professor of Latin American history. He immediately surmises that the attacker must be a foreigner who can’t speak English who is being helped by naive people like his daughter Kim.

A number of the characters in the book are involved in the effort to support refugees—most of whom are illegals, refugees who have been refused and are in danger of being deported. It is a world of immense suffering, complicated people, amoral systems and agents of mercy.

There is Rosemary, the righteous Anglican woman who is trying to “save” a Colombian refugee named Rodrigo. It is she who explains the biblical roots of the term “cities of refuge.” There were six cities in Israel that welcomed “only those who killed without enmity and were subject to the laws of blood vengeance. They didn’t deserve to die, so they needed a place where they could be safe.”

Father André is the Anglican theologian and soup kitchen priest who tries to get people “to look at what they want and what they fear.” He sees himself as belonging to a dying breed, “the Retainers of the Long Knowledge … the historical, the private, the spiritual.”

The book weaves back and forth between the suffering that is near and the suffering from afar that has now become part of the city. The characters of Kim and her father are superbly drawn. The more we learn of them the less we know for sure. Kim, who does not think of herself as religious, nonetheless goes to sleep “naming the names” or praying for the people she cares about. Harold is a man given to lies who nevertheless weeps at the sunrise over Mexico City.

However, the refugees in the book are more one dimensional. This must be how they appear to people who are working with them for a short time, such as the volunteers at GROUND. The refugees are wrapped round with sadness and suffering. It is Rosemary who summarizes the desperate situation of so many of them: “We take them in, a kind of miracle to them, and support them only enough until they begin to see that they can’t really escape their past here, and many can’t ever have a future. And so they begin to rot.” She has taken up the mission of correcting the fictions about refugees created by the Canadian climate of fear.

I believe refugees are more complex than even Rosemary thinks they are. Their reality can be distorted not only by the judgement but by the compassion of others. Most refugees are going through a legal process that is long and difficult. Yet they attend to their kids with a daily devotion. Refugees are not only sad; they are also immensely funny, full of inventiveness and amazingly resilient. This takes time to discover, proximity and neighbourliness. There is not enough time for this in Cities of Refuge.

Nevertheless, this book is not only about refugees. It is also about the human condition and the questions that we hold in common. We hold them differently, to be sure, but not separately. In his luminous prose, Helm has dared to go beyond the psychological level to the level of spirit. His characters struggle with the weight of the past and wonder whether we can ever remember it truly. They ask whether the sins of the parents are visited on the children. “He sees it all linking back through the years to a kind of original sin. And we’ve all paid for it.” Kim wonders whether forgiveness is possible. She weighs whether love is stronger than fear, and why it is still possible to love a deeply flawed human being.

Helm leaves Kim and the reader in an uncertain but surer place. In an unexpected kindness she experiences something less than God but more than luck: “it was certainly mystery, a small conferred radiance.” She likens this to the gift of the city. “One day it tries to kill you and another it finds you and hauls you clear and gives you something not entirely rational to believe in. Like that healing mysteries didn’t fall on you but rose up, drawn forth simply by your paying attention to the lives of others.”

I read this book several times and pondered some paragraphs at length. I will return to Cities of Refuge. It is worth the time.