A Towering Work of Fiction

Hédi Bouraoui, a poet and professor, was a finalist for the Trillium Award when his most recent novel was first published in French as Ainsi parle la Tour CN.Translated into English in 2009, Thus Speaks the CN Tower is a testament to the author’s poetic abilities and political insights. Born in the Maghreb and professor emeritus of French at York University, Bouraoui is in the unique position of exploring our great experiment—multiculturalism—from what he likes to call the “three solitudes”—the anglo, the immigrant and the francophone.

Thus Speaks the CN Tower paints a portrait of the beauty and challenges of the city of Toronto, and in wider reflection Canada, from the perspective of the 553 metres of concrete erected in 1976 as the Canadian National Tower. I have to admit, it is a unique device. What would the Arc de Triomphe say about Paris? Or the Brooklyn Bridge about New York post 9/11? Interestingly enough, the tower’s voice is female (Tour being feminine in the novel’s original French) and she goes to great lengths to explain that she is no Babel. Our architectural protagonist is a neutral transmitter, her antennae picking up everything.

Between more abstract musings, our narrator reflects on the intersecting lives of a cast of characters who work in her body—the Mohawk construction worker Pete Deloon, the Sudanese political refugee and elevator officer Souleyman Mokoko, the frustrated anglo personnel officer Kelly King and the lunatic Symphorien Lebreton who “feeds my staircase bits of paper, love notes.”

These characters are clearly the fabric of our country, and many of them are painted quite beautifully, especially Pete, raised in a convent, recently fired from his job, wandering the streets of Yorkville. Pete is modelled on Bill Eustace, aka “Sweet William,” a member of the CN Tower’s construction crew and the first person to parachute off her in 1974. But the author has the tendency to pull us out of the characters’ real, reflective, lives with the tower’s more meta-political musings on multiculturalism, sometimes in a heavy handed way and to the detriment of the story’s flow.

At times, some of the characters also risk being token representations of the various communities they inhabit. The icy-anglo Kelly King is described as a “young woman on the move belonging to the English majority … drawn from early childhood to the tradition of governing her territory. Always on time, she possesses the Puritan work ethic and performs her tasks with obsessive loyalty.” Unfortunately, this lack of nuance does not help create a deeper understanding of people and place, and can often hinder an otherwise elegantly written passage.

So how does one write the changing face of a city? Thus Speaks the CN Tower made me reflect on the ways writers paint fictional portraits of the places where more than half of the world’s population now live, and what makes them successful. Many metropolitan novels came to mind—The Bombay of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Dickensian London in Great Expectations, Thomas King’s A Short History of Indians in Canada, Joyce’s Dubliners, Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. They are all broad in scope. They all follow a disparate cast of characters. But one novel stands out as comparable to the aspirations of Bouraoui’s Toronto to me, in using a specific physical entity and an associated event, as the lynchpin holding together those disparate urban lives.

“No novelist writing of New York has climbed higher, dived deeper,” the late Frank McCourt wrote of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. And I have to agree with him. Held together by another architectural wonder in the process of construction—the Twin Towers—and Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between them on an early morning in 1974, this is truly a beautiful portrait of a changing city of immigrants. The era is the same and the lynchpin is similar; the difference—and I would argue the key to a successful portrait of a city—is that we can hear the voices of its inhabitants. And it is through their voices that the trials and tribulations of the metropolis are understood. The challenges of immigration, the pain of being a newcomer, are felt through the story, not told to the reader. As through the voice of one of McCann’s protagonists, a recent émigré from Ireland:

The New Yorkers of McCann’s novel are prostitutes in the Bronx, an Upper East Side mother who has lost her son in Vietnam, a Guatemalan nurse studying medicine at night. The Twin Towers and Petit’s tightrope walk surface and resurface. Watching that spectacle is a shared experience of the New Yorkers, just as encountering the CN Tower is common to Bouraoui’s characters.

McCann’s device binds the characters together, while Bouraoui’s sometimes keeps the reader at a distance from the fictional men and women who work within the CN Tower.

Toronto needs its great novel. The strength of Thus Speaks the CN Tower lies in its unique device—a place seen through the objective eye of a structure, the poetics of the tower’s reflections and the author’s political insights on the trials and tribulations of the multicultural experiment. Its weakness lies when those more academic musings threaten to take over the hearts and lives of its characters. But like Philippe Petit in Let the Great World Spin or Pete Deloon in Thus Speaks the CN Tower, somebody needs to take that first step onto the wire, that great leap of faith and, as McCann has done for New York, write the definitive love song to this city.