false1718914038565950497803856595055721Consolation: a Novelhttp://photo.goodreads.com/books/1187362688m/1718914.jpg
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1718914.Consolation_a_Novel
48194Michael Redhill1825340falseSat Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007Thu Sep 27 11:08:44 -0700 2007Thu Sep 27 11:09:20 -0700 2007 As regular readers know, all this month I'm doing a special concentration here on the nominees for the 2007 Booker Prize, basically the British version of the Pulitzer (and a prize many think is actually more impressive than the Pulitzer); and it's no surprise that in general I've been disappointed by the nominated books I've now read, finding them on the whole to be too delicate, too inconsequential, too "Delightfully British" in the worst way possible. And thus do we come to the fourth Booker nominee to be reviewed here at CCLaP, Michael Redhill's Consolation; and surprisingly enough, this one I actually did enjoy quite a bit, and have been spending some time recently thinking about why that is. Partly, I suppose, that it's set in Canada, which is the least British and most American of all the British Commonwealth nations, which are the only countries eligible for the Booker; partly because it's not only Canadian, but specifically a love letter to the city of Toronto, and I'm a fan of literary love letters to big cities. Partly because of the intriguing dual storyline, I'm sure, one set in the modern age and one during Toronto's founding in the Victorian Age; partly because those storylines are filled with fascinating and complex characters, all of them interacting with a dual mystery at the heart of the plot. In any case, I'm happy to finally come across a Booker nominee I actually enjoyed; I was starting to think that maybe there was something wrong with me!
In essence a mystery story, Consolation tells the tale of eccentric historian David Hollis, who lives so fully in the past that he an actually walk around Toronto telling you who lived in random houses in the 1860s. Hollis has Lou Gehrig's Disease and is rapidly dying, but has decided to spend his remaining days pursuing an obscure theory he has formed -- that buried under the debris of Toronto's lakefront is a series of priceless artifacts concerning the city's history. See, like Chicago, turns out that Toronto created its own artificial shoreline in the early 20th century, with landfill literally being poured in around shipwrecks and the like; Hollis has become convinced that one of these shipwrecks contains a leather-covered lockbox full of rare glass photo negatives, surveying almost the entire city limits at a specific moment in the mid-1850s. Given that barely any documents from this period of the city's history exist, this would be a major find indeed; the problem, though, is that the theory is based on highly circumstantial evidence, not enough to convince a politician to spend the tax money on an urban archeological dig, leaving Hollis' theory still unproven at the time of his death.