Reading cities: books about Toronto

Built by immigrants, permanently overshadowed by its close neighbour New York and a bit self-obsessed, Toronto shines in fiction. Chris Michael introduces us to the Canadian city’s cultural personality and its literature – from Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje to the best non-fiction

Which are your favourite Toronto books? Let us know in the comments

Toronto flared briefly in the popular imagination last year. A mayor who smokes crack, bowls over a seven-term councilwoman and is challenged to an armwrestling duel by 80s WWF legend the Iron Sheik – now retired and in a wheelchair – will do that for a city. With the Rob Ford Show shelved, however, and no recent sightings of Tiny Monkey in Posh Coat, Toronto appears to have dropped back out of popular culture. The third-biggest city in North America has reverted to its reputation for being, in the words of Steve Martin, like New York without all the stuff.

But fiction has a long memory. As opposed to say, film, where Toronto regularly stands in for other locations (then, ironically, hosts an A-list festival to show off all those movies that aren’t about it), in books, the city shines. It is, after all, the great city of English Canada, a nation almost determinedly circumspect and courteous even as it boils under the lid; so perhaps it is no surprise to discover it is on the page that this still-growing metropolis’s history, vanity and occasional tragedy find their voice.

Head to the east and you find yourself in Ernest Thompson Seton territory, where that great Victorian naturalist (a favourite of Margaret Atwood’s in childhood) did the private exploring that led to his classics, Wild Animals I Have Known and Two Little Savages. Follow the ravine south from the St Clair bridge as it joins the Don proper and soon you’ll reach Bloor Street, where (with a little imagination) you can see Michael Ondaatje’s characters from In the Skin of a Lion completing the construction of the Bloor viaduct in the 1930s. Keep going and you can glimpse, on the east bank that forms Riverdale Park, the lovers and dreamers who populate the young Morley Callaghan’s novels of the 1920s, like It’s Never Over, that intense account of claustrophobic urban frustration. Move on south to Gerrard and Dundas, glance to your right, and there are Hugh Garner’s defeated Cabbagetown dwellers, sitting on the grassy slopes as they endure the Depression and wonder whether to volunteer for the war in Spain. Not far away, you’ll run into the male protagonist of Catherine Bush’s 1993 novel, Minus Time, that wonderfully Toronto-centric book; he tells us that as a 13-year-old he ran away from home and lived in the ravines, becoming briefly famous in the papers as Ravine Boy. Keep going far enough, reach the lake, make a right, and eventually you can find a major Robertson Davies character, Boy Staunton from Fifth Business, dead at the bottom of Toronto harbour, sitting in his Cadillac convertible, his mouth inexplicably filled with a large chunk of pink granite.

Margaret Atwood is the city’s furious literary champion: determined to preserve its memory and to imagine its future

The key to Toronto’s personality is its endless, self-defeating obsession with being identified as a “world-class city”

Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter

Continue reading...