JasonParis
Moderator
Old photos inspired Michael Redhill's 'One Book' Consolation
Feb 03, 2008 04:30 AM
TORONTO STAR
Geoff Pevere
Books Critic
Old images like this one from about 1856 of King St. kick-started Michael Redhill’s imagination and led to “Consolation”, about Toronto’s compulsion to erase its past.
Michael Redhill is one of the very few people to share my excitement about the manholes.
I first discovered them in the late 1980s, just after I'd moved into a working-class Portuguese neighbourhood in the downtown west end of this city. They were dated 1889, and every time I spotted one I imagined life in Toronto a century before. What kind of shoes had stepped on them? Where were they bearing their wearers and on what business?
Then, around the turn of the decade, they disappeared, and I have not seen one since.
"I totally sympathize with what what you're talking about," sighs the author of Consolation – recently selected as the "One Book" to read by the Toronto Public Library's "Keep Toronto Reading" campaign – on the phone from his home in France.
"That evidence is now gone," says Redhill, whose celebrated second novel is about a city only too keen to bury all existing remnants of its past. "It's just one more link to the place that we come from that was carelessly removed, and it's unfortunate that no attempt at preservation was ever made."
In Consolation, surviving family members of a city historian attempt to honour the dead man's legacy by halting the construction of a new development over a site where the hull of an old ship – perhaps containing a trove of photographic evidence of the city in the mid-19th-century – emerges like a mastodon skeleton from the rubble.
In the book's parallel narrative, the former pharmacist responsible for taking some of the photographs wanders the 1850s streets of a new Canadian city – one as strange to the reader as it is to the book's displaced Englishman, but in the latter instance because it's a place where the past is as hidden from its modern inhabitants as the future was to those who long ago lived there.
"I have a strange habit of walking down streets and staring up, rather than looking at shopfronts and stuff like that," explains Redhill, a playwright, literary editor, actor and novelist who moved to Toronto over forty years ago (when less than a year old) from Baltimore.
"And I found that through my life, living in the city of Toronto, I look above the Pizza Pizza sign and I look above the other signs and window dressing and I see evidence of a city that no longer exists in the keystones and the decorations that line the tops of buildings.
"That presence of the old city has always moved me."
Redhill began writing Consolation in the late 1990s, motivated equally by the desire to alert his fellow citizens to the historical toll taken by Toronto's "developmental frenzy" as he was to write a book rooted in his city's soil and tell a story that connected two eras in Toronto's relatively brief but criminally neglected civic history.
I ask Redhill how he accounts for that neglect, an apparent civic amnesia blighting Toronto more dramatically than just about any other centre of its size and significance.
"In part because it's a young city. We live in a place that's just over 200 years old now and although it's as old as it's ever been to us who live there, in the context of world cities it's not a very old city at all.
"And like most young adults or adolescents, fashion is sometimes more important than common sense. I think that different corners of the city find themselves occasionally caught up in this desire to try on something new ... That kind of spontaneity is good, I think, but I think it has to be counterbalanced by a sense of the place it's going up in, how it's going to be used and what will happen to if after we're gone."
Redhill recalls being thunderstruck by a series of photographs he discovered in book by William Dendy called Lost Toronto. A 360-degree panorama consisting of thirteen shots of the city taken in 1856 from a hotel at the corner of Simcoe and York Streets, the pictures sparked in the author a kind of hypothetical reverie of the city that once was. In fictional form, the photos would also come to play a key role in Consolation.
"Seeing those pictures," recalls Redhill, "And reading Dendy's narrative of what happened in those streets and in those buildings and in those shops and who lived in that city, it just brought it all to life."
Considering the book is so profoundly motivated by the author's passionate conviction to know the city through its past, and to protect that past from further acts of developmental sabotage, Consolation's selection as the inaugural book in the community-wide "Keep Toronto Reading" campaign touches Redhill considerably.
"As you can imagine it's a huge, huge thing for me," he says. "It's big for me because it's the city of Toronto that chose it, it's the Toronto Public Library where I did a lot of my research who chose it, and it's also especially sweet because a year ago, by January of 2007, the book was dead. It had had its run, for whatever it was worth, in Canada, it had not done well in the States and it was not looking good in England either."
He pauses, no doubt scanning well above storefront level for the right metaphor.
"It's like being showered with gold."
Feb 03, 2008 04:30 AM
TORONTO STAR
Geoff Pevere
Books Critic
Old images like this one from about 1856 of King St. kick-started Michael Redhill’s imagination and led to “Consolation”, about Toronto’s compulsion to erase its past.
Michael Redhill is one of the very few people to share my excitement about the manholes.
I first discovered them in the late 1980s, just after I'd moved into a working-class Portuguese neighbourhood in the downtown west end of this city. They were dated 1889, and every time I spotted one I imagined life in Toronto a century before. What kind of shoes had stepped on them? Where were they bearing their wearers and on what business?
Then, around the turn of the decade, they disappeared, and I have not seen one since.
"I totally sympathize with what what you're talking about," sighs the author of Consolation – recently selected as the "One Book" to read by the Toronto Public Library's "Keep Toronto Reading" campaign – on the phone from his home in France.
"That evidence is now gone," says Redhill, whose celebrated second novel is about a city only too keen to bury all existing remnants of its past. "It's just one more link to the place that we come from that was carelessly removed, and it's unfortunate that no attempt at preservation was ever made."
In Consolation, surviving family members of a city historian attempt to honour the dead man's legacy by halting the construction of a new development over a site where the hull of an old ship – perhaps containing a trove of photographic evidence of the city in the mid-19th-century – emerges like a mastodon skeleton from the rubble.
In the book's parallel narrative, the former pharmacist responsible for taking some of the photographs wanders the 1850s streets of a new Canadian city – one as strange to the reader as it is to the book's displaced Englishman, but in the latter instance because it's a place where the past is as hidden from its modern inhabitants as the future was to those who long ago lived there.
"I have a strange habit of walking down streets and staring up, rather than looking at shopfronts and stuff like that," explains Redhill, a playwright, literary editor, actor and novelist who moved to Toronto over forty years ago (when less than a year old) from Baltimore.
"And I found that through my life, living in the city of Toronto, I look above the Pizza Pizza sign and I look above the other signs and window dressing and I see evidence of a city that no longer exists in the keystones and the decorations that line the tops of buildings.
"That presence of the old city has always moved me."
Redhill began writing Consolation in the late 1990s, motivated equally by the desire to alert his fellow citizens to the historical toll taken by Toronto's "developmental frenzy" as he was to write a book rooted in his city's soil and tell a story that connected two eras in Toronto's relatively brief but criminally neglected civic history.
I ask Redhill how he accounts for that neglect, an apparent civic amnesia blighting Toronto more dramatically than just about any other centre of its size and significance.
"In part because it's a young city. We live in a place that's just over 200 years old now and although it's as old as it's ever been to us who live there, in the context of world cities it's not a very old city at all.
"And like most young adults or adolescents, fashion is sometimes more important than common sense. I think that different corners of the city find themselves occasionally caught up in this desire to try on something new ... That kind of spontaneity is good, I think, but I think it has to be counterbalanced by a sense of the place it's going up in, how it's going to be used and what will happen to if after we're gone."
Redhill recalls being thunderstruck by a series of photographs he discovered in book by William Dendy called Lost Toronto. A 360-degree panorama consisting of thirteen shots of the city taken in 1856 from a hotel at the corner of Simcoe and York Streets, the pictures sparked in the author a kind of hypothetical reverie of the city that once was. In fictional form, the photos would also come to play a key role in Consolation.
"Seeing those pictures," recalls Redhill, "And reading Dendy's narrative of what happened in those streets and in those buildings and in those shops and who lived in that city, it just brought it all to life."
Considering the book is so profoundly motivated by the author's passionate conviction to know the city through its past, and to protect that past from further acts of developmental sabotage, Consolation's selection as the inaugural book in the community-wide "Keep Toronto Reading" campaign touches Redhill considerably.
"As you can imagine it's a huge, huge thing for me," he says. "It's big for me because it's the city of Toronto that chose it, it's the Toronto Public Library where I did a lot of my research who chose it, and it's also especially sweet because a year ago, by January of 2007, the book was dead. It had had its run, for whatever it was worth, in Canada, it had not done well in the States and it was not looking good in England either."
He pauses, no doubt scanning well above storefront level for the right metaphor.
"It's like being showered with gold."
Anyhow, glad to see I'm not alone....