Storms Are Easy, Marriage Is Hard

The year was 1954, the season autumn, the climactic event a furious hurricane that swept up from the Caribbean into Canada and tore through Toronto, washing out bridges and houses, leaving 4,000 homeless and 81 dead, many of the bodies found stuck in trees the next morning by the bloated Humber River. I was not living in Toronto at the time—October 1954—but an aunt was and that is what she told me about Hurricane Hazel. “The next morning they found bodies in the trees,” she said.

Mark Sinnett could not have invented a more Canadian, more Ontario, more Toronto setting for his remarkable novel. If Hurricane Hazel was not enough, a month earlier young Marilyn Bell, only 16, had managed to swim across Lake Ontario, wading ashore in Toronto as thousands waited for her at the Canadian National Exhibition. Among those waiting (along with a real-life Pierre Berton) are Sinnett’s two main characters: Ray Townes, a Toronto cop, and his wife, Mary, a hospital nurse.

Ray is in his early thirties and to Mary he looks like “he had been made of gold” and “a movie star hired to play the part of a policeman.” We learn about Ray and Mary in the contrapuntal chapters that follow, ranging from Marilyn Bell and Hurricane Hazel in 1954 all the way to 2004 when Ray is 84 and dying of emphysema—the love gone, the marriage in tatters, replaced by cynicism and contempt.

There is much in this story about water. There is Marilyn Bell’s heroic swim, then the heavy rains and the killer flood in west-end Toronto. There are Mary’s wistful yearnings for the thunderous waters of Niagara Falls. There are even water spots on the dust jacket, as if we needed still more proof that water plays a huge role in this novel. The water metaphor includes drowning, choking, suffocation, Ray’s own strangling emphysema and, perhaps above all, the choking sensation of a marriage gone bad.

The story brings to my mind the 1950 Japanese movie Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa, which tells the story of the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband, told from the points of view of four different witnesses. Similarly, The Carnivore tells the story of a philandering Ray and a faithful Mary, both from their own points of view, both urgently involved in their respective duties on the night Hazel smashed through Toronto.

Ray and Mary seem a happy couple at the beginning. Mary is newly pregnant as the skies darken and the rain begins. They are planning an excursion to Niagara Falls, one of Mary’s favourite places because she is enthralled by the movie Niagara, and seems to have a wistful, imaginary friendship with Marilyn Monroe. Ray is a terrific cop; Mary is a terrific nurse. If the novel were strictly linear we could say things start slowly and begin to unravel, but we discover this only in fits and starts as Ray and Mary jump back and forth in the narrative, like a couple constantly interrupting each other.

This technique is rather skillful, but also confusing because of the constantly and quickly changing voices and perspectives, from the hurly-burly of the night of the great storm in 1954 to Ray hooked up to an oxygen tank with a quietly seething wife waiting for him to die. But maybe it was intended to be confusing, because that is what life is like.

I put The Carnivore aside and reread it a week later, and the second time around it was the detailed research and the beauty of the writing that impressed me, the way Sinnett captures the lure and excitement of illicit sex—in Ray’s case the actuality of it, in Mary’s the imagining of it. Somehow over 50 years, this middle-class Toronto couple manages to raise a family, enjoy friends, make plans, do a little modest travel and ineluctably move on to an unhappy but somehow welcome end when Mary finally is freed of the carnivore’s grasp by his wasting disease.

Not much leavening humour here, nothing that leaps off the pages, but if you want to learn about what a storm such as Hurricane Hazel would be like, The Carnivore provides you with rich details, beginning on the first page when Sinnett writes: “In the beginning there was only darkness and heavy rain. Sudden black waters that ruffled and swarmed like a plague over the roads and fields, poured like Guinness into abandoned stairwells.” Patrons toss empty beer bottles from the roof of the Gladstone Hotel, some with notes in them.

The Carnivore is a joy to read for its descriptions of a long-ago Toronto, when work was beginning on the building of the subway. Sinnett gives us richly detailed descriptions of the streets, buildings and stores, the hullabaloo of the Canadian National Exhibition, all of which capture the drowsy mood of the city in the 1950s.

Sinnett does not tell us of the years between 1954 and 2004, so we must fill in the blanks and make our own assumptions by dwelling on these bookend years. A newspaper reporter visits Ray and Mary 50 years after Hurricane Hazel to write a feature story on Ray’s heroics of 1954. Mary watches and listens with disdain as Ray tries to give the young reporter what she wants to hear. Meanwhile, Mary has found a notebook Ray has kept, one that does not jibe with the story he told the reporter.

“I didn’t lie,” Ray tells Mary.
“—with every omission, you shrink in my eyes,” Mary counters.

This a story about a storm and a marriage. Ray and Mary do much better with the storm, less so with the marriage. The storm washes away bridges, rips trees out by their roots, sweeps people to their deaths, wrecks houses and drowns dogs. Over the next 50 years the marriage suffocates two otherwise decent people with routines and ordinariness. The storm allows Ray and Mary to do what they do best. He emerges as a hero, with his handsome mug in the newspapers; she works round the clock at the hospital tending to the wounded and nearly dead.

The storm is passionate, dangerous, exciting, as is Ray’s illicit affair with a woman who wants to be handcuffed and have sex in an elevator in Simpson’s department store. Mary entertains notions of romance but remains faithful, entertaining herself with her notions of a friendship with Marilyn Monroe. The marriage begins with much promise but over 50 years becomes calcified by the betrayal at the heart of it, a betrayal that reaches back to the night of the hurricane.

Sinnett won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for The Landing, a collection of poetry. He was also a finalist for the Arthur Ellis crime-writing award for his novel The Border Guards. His working title for The Carnivore was The Hero’s Affairs, which might have been a bit better than the one he finally chose, although Suffocation would have been the best.