Mixing Memory with Desire

Early in Consolation, Michael Redhill’s second novel (his first being Martin Sloane, 2001), two street urchins freeze to death on the Toronto waterfront while they wait to sneak aboard a ship. The year is 1856. As he pictures their consignment to Potter’s Field, dour Jem Hallam, newly arrived from England, muses “and so they entered time, a conveyance more reliable than boats.” That they would have had to wait four months for the ice to thaw and navigation to reopen reveals how desperate they were to leave town.

A competent novel will achieve its last word without having stumbled more than once or twice; a good one—Consolation is such a book—looks around as it crosses the finish line, arms raised, flaunting its well-formed limbs. It is fitting that the aforementioned pair died waiting for a boat that never sailed, at least not for them. As its sections alternate between 1856 and 1997, the book derives its plot from the mystery of a sunken...