Consolation by Michael Redhill

Upon winning the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for his novel Life of Pi, Canadian author Yann Martel took to the podium and made a comparison that would resonate through the Canadian media in the days to follow, likening the country to “the greatest hotel on Earth”.

In Consolation, author Michael Redhill (Martin Sloane) takes that analogy and runs with it even further, building on the images of Canadian authors who have come before, to create a picture of Canada – or more specifically Toronto – as a temporary hotel room, a place with a short memory and a shifting shoreline, where nature is never truly tamed and no matter how long ago your ancestors first found purchase in the country, you’re still simply just a visitor. A guest at this strange hotel.

Specifically, Consolation weaves between two tales, present and future, stories that overlap and connect in ways that only become clear as the novel progresses. In 1997, “forensic geologist” David Hollis, dealing with the crippling effects of Lou Gehrig’s disease, sees his body quickly deteriorating and chooses to make that inevitable return to nature on his own terms. His family is left to deal with the after effects, and with his legacy: specifically, an academic record brought to shambles by a monograph published prior to his death, in which Hollis outlined the presence of a series of photographic glass negatives more than 100 years old, the oldest photographic record of Toronto’s landscape.

The problem is that the monograph is based on a diary Hollis refused to show, and that the so-called negatives – which may or may not actually exist – were lost in the hull of a boat shipwrecked just off of the Toronto shoreline; a boat now buried well under the city itself, the shoreline having moved outwards with generations of city growth.

Trying to prove the photos’ existence, Hollis’ widow Marianne holes herself up in a hotel room looking over one of the urban centre’s most controversial construction sites – modern-day machinery digging up what she hopes will be the location of the ship in question. And here she remains, trusting that her husband’s good name will resurface with the excavation findings.

Meanwhile, more than 100 years in the past, David’s story is interspersed with the tale of how those photographs came to be. They told a story of early Toronto, when Canada’s wilderness was still being tamed, as were the tourists who traveled over oceans to make this place – with its harsh conditions and lack of creature comforts – their home. Here, many see their stay in this city as only a temporary solution, that proverbial “hotel” where they can make some money and then leave.

Others, like the apothecary Jem Hallam, expect to thrive in this new land, and on doing so find success they couldn’t imagine back home. They find others like themselves; a town full of failures and ne’er do wells, all of them expecting to bend this new land to their own uses, only to find a land that doesn’t bend so easy. In the end, they’re the ones who have to change.

Despite its urban setting, then, Consolation is a continuation of themes that pervade through the annals of Canadian and US literature; themes of wilderness, survival and man versus nature. By taking the story out of the backwoods, though, Redhill has something rather new to say: that those themes aren’t exclusive to the brush, but wage on in the urban centres, too. “Human beings interrupt the natural cycles of growth and decay with their communities and their structures, but don’t stop those cycles,” he writes.

So while the story itself, then, is specific to Toronto – in fact, the city is perhaps the most important character in the novel – the themes are applicable to most cities in this new world, where histories are short and residents, for the most part, are immigrants of one sort or another. And like the immigrants in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, they’re attempting to build a city with a thriving identity, a city that will in turn help mould their own personal identities, as well.

Such identities, though, are tentative at best, and in the end what Redhill leaves the reader with is a question that is more current and political than the book – with its lumbering tales of survival, death, and love in all its derivatives – lets on. And that is the question of identity of place; an intangible thing created not brick by brick, but weaved out of fact and fiction. And with that comes the question of personal identity, as well, and whether it should be tied so closely to the resulting tapestry; if place, with its shifting narrative, should be allowed to make the mould by which we see ourselves. Or, in contrast, if a city should be nothing more to us than a random hotel room, a place to lay our heads.

By asking that question, Redhill elevates Consolation above a simple love letter for the city on which it’s based, questioning the validity of the very love that’s at its core.