Where There’s Smoke

Tomas Hachard’s debut novel, City in Flames, contemplates the power of those “fickle things” called words: “They can transform while travelling from mouth to ear. They can overflow with meaning or remain hollow.” In a near future, a charismatic politician known as P. rises from city council disrupter in Hillside, a thinly disguised version of Toronto, to populist demagogue across the “nation,” a country fraught with natural disasters, rising living costs, and social inequities. The “eloquent intensity” of P.’s words unites “the West Coast yuppies, the small-towners on the East Coast, the miners and oil barons in the North, the boring bureaucrats in the Capital.” But his control rests on this “smokescreen” of verbal power, and he’s quickly deposed. In the wake of his short-lived tenure emerge “the fires,” a series of anarchic infernos lit by warring citizens of competing political stripes. City in Flames is not only about a...