Explosive Justice

Ernst Zundel’s former lair on Toronto’s Carlton Street loomed over my Cabbagetown childhood; the fortress, with its gates and barred windows, security cameras and propaganda-scrolling marquee, lay on my route to school. Too young at the time to understand the full implications of the ominous sight, I was disturbed by my mother’s account of Zundel’s very public hatemongering.

Lost Between the Edges is a fictionalized account of the firebombing of this very fortress on May 8, 1995. The second novel of Toronto-based artist, professor and writer Eldon Garnet, it is an intelligent and troubling, if almost painfully earnest, read. Against a background of historical documents interspersed as “footnotes,” it follows the shady, shabby “X.” in his planning of the bombing and its aftermath. Although drawing on historical events and documents, Lost is not a work of historical fiction; it is a re-appropriation of the events and a philosophical examination of...