The Emanuel Jacques murder through the eyes of a young Toronto boy
December 2013
In the summer of 1977 Toronto was a city on the move, a boomtown rising out of the ashes of the Big Smoke. Finishing touches were being placed on an improbably ambitious building in the south of the city that, when completed, would be the tallest freestanding structure in the entire world. The glittering Eaton Centre had just opened its…
A satirical take on getting old.
January–February 2012
Plots are as much subject to the vagaries of fashion and taste as anything else. Some seem to have a definite shelf life (if you are working furiously on a novel about a Parisian time traveller’s wife you should probably stop; that ship has sailed) and others disappear because they cease to be plausible (it is…
A Canadian resident learns what happens when the town council calls the bluff of the lower-taxes movement
January | February 2011
It is early October 2010, and I am in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on my way to a session about planning city budgets, at not quite six in the evening. The sun has just set behind Pikes Peak, and the dying light throws a purple glow off the mountain. This is the same luminescence that Katharine Lee Bates noted in 1893 when she lived here and taught English at The Colorado College—the same department and university that employ me now—and that she remembered two years later in her famous poem about majestic purple mountains and amber waves of…
Bombs explode and families implode in a novel set in Sarajevo and the Bruce Peninsula
April 2010
The Honey Locust, Jeffrey Round’s novel about the siege of Sarajevo, is structured on a juxtaposition: it lays the disagreements and resentments that tear a family apart alongside the historical hatreds, political machinations and horrendous violence of war.
There is something familiar about this sort of set-up; it is the cloth from which several recent action movies have been…
A dense novel brings the locations we inhabit to the foreground
May 2008
As most readers probably already know, Asylum is Andre Alexis’s second novel. It follows Childhood, which won the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award and was short listed for the Giller Prize. Second novels are notoriously difficult to judge on their own merits, particularly those issued in the wake of such…
A veteran of the Great War battles with personal ghosts and political uncertainties
January–February 2007
Alan Cumyn’s new novel, The Famished Lover, is a sequel to his earlier novel, The Sojourn, which tells the story of Ramsay Crome, a young Canadian painter turned soldier who is granted a week’s leave during World War I. During his time away from the front, Ramsay travels to London to visit his uncle…
A historical novel based on Arctic adventure weaves together source and story
March 2006
Afterlands is a gripping adventure story that is also a complex meditation on the relation between history and the historical novel. All historical novels raise the question of how they are related to their source material. They claim to be fiction, but they also claim a place outside fiction. A reviewer’s task in such an instance is to determine if a novel should be first beautiful or first…
Fine storytelling about a journey from Saskatchewan to Mexico
January–February 2005
There is no such thing as a really original road-trip story. It doesn’t matter whether the road you set out on is the QEW or Route 66 or a dirt road leading from the Tabard Inn in London to Canterbury Cathedral—if you’re telling a story about a road trip, there is going to be something familiar about…
