Winner
Consolation
Michael Redhill
published by Doubleday Canada
Intriguing, perceptive, and irresistibly moving, Consolation is a haunting novel about the traces of history layered in our lives, and how time alters the contours of even the things we hold most certain.
As he slips beneath the waves of Toronto's harbour, Professor David Hollis follows in death the man he pursued in the last years of life.
One hundred and fifty years earlier, J.G. Hallam, an English apothecary, is sent by his father to open a shop in the new world. But instead Hallam becomes a partner in a photography business; when he is offered the opportunity to take photographs for the municipal government, the bleak and ungainly young city takes shape before his lens.
These are the photographs Hollis despairs of finding. Tormented by his colleagues' derision and his own failing health, he is helped by an unusual kinship with his daughter's fiancé. John Lewis, a bookkeeper by training, works as a researcher for a failed playwright, and is struggling to build a life for himself. After Hollis's death, he joins with the grieving widow, Marion, in a furtive, unsettling collaboration to vindicate her husband.
The shores of Lake Ontario have shifted dramatically over the century and a half: Hollis had speculated that the sunken ship containing the photographs would be beneath the site where the city's new Union Arena is to be built. And so Marion installs herself in a hotel overlooking the site, awaiting the moment a bulldozer uncovers a piece of the past that will burnish her husband's memory.
Exquisitely crafted and masterfully told, Michael Redhill's superlative new book moves seamlessly between Toronto's past and present, depicting the way history is often transformed into a species of fantasy. Consolation, a perfectly absorbing novel, evokes the mysteries of love and memory, and what suffering the absence of the beloved truly means.
Michael Redhill
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Michael Redhill is the publisher and one of the editors of Brick. He is the author of the novel Martin Sloane, a finalist for the Giller prize and the 2002 Toronto Book Awards, and the short story collection Fidelity. He has also written four poetry collections, including Asphodel and Light-Crossing, and four plays, the latest of which, Goodness won the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award in 2006. He lives with his partner and their two sons in France. |
Excerpt from Consolation
Men and women who were not our fathers and mothers brought us into this world. They made this city before us. We know that a man once stood on a scaffold eighty feet above the ground and painted in brilliant white the words 'GELBER BROS. WHOLESALE WOOLLENS' on the side of the red-brick building at 225 Richmond Street. We know because we have seen that sign since we were children, we have watched it slowly fade - the brick rising through the skin of the weathered paint like a welt-and though we do not know the name of the man who put those words there, and likely he is dead, we cannot doubt that he lived, he lived here, he worked here, he was a Torontonian.
From Consolation by Michael Redhill. Published by Doubleday Canada. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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