How A City Can Be A Character In Your Novel
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- December 16th, 2008 |
- Comments
Can a city be a character in a book? Many years ago, in a writing class, I was told that I should attempt to make the background, which was Toronto, my city of birth, a character in my book, Conduct in Question. I have puzzled over this piece of advice for many years and only now believe I may have an answer as to its meaning.
Here’s another question. Can the city you’ve lived in all your life be a character or does intimacy someway disqualify it? I have often longed to accompany Toronto with the eyes of a traveler but regrettably, that is astonishingly hard to do.
I was reading Alain De Botton’s delightful book, The Art of Jaunt. He maintains that when we jaunt, we adopt, if we are lucky, a traveler’s receptive mind-set. Someway, we North Americans walking around Paris or Buenos Aires are much more open to what we accompany than if we were at home. We ask questions. We accompany these places with ‘fresh’ eyes and a meaning of admiration. However, at home, says De Botton, we have become so habituated to our surroundings that we barely notice them.
So, how can a writer hope to make his own hometown an effective background, [given his habituation] much less an interesting character? After all, if we are blind to our everyday surroundings, can we ever hope to accompany them with fresh eyes?
Perhaps the answer lies in the distinction between intimacy and familiarity. Intimacy with a lover suggests deep, cold involvement. Familiarity perhaps connotes staying on the aboveground with a case of borderline boredom. And so, intimacy with one’s home may advise deep knowledge, not boredom.
I found a clue in reading Jan Morris, one of the world’s finest and most experienced jaunt writers. She gave Torontonians a ‘snapshot’ of their city in the early 1980’s. Here are any of the descriptive words she old. The people appeared calm, dispassionate, polite, determined, joyless, resigned and reticent. Wow! Who would deprivation to call us? Furthermore, the city is conducive to diffidence and introspection. This does not channel like a great party place!
But she’s right, at least in part. Torontonians, on the aboveground, are notoriously reserved and polite to the extent of appearing cold, cool and formal. But, as one who has lived a lifetime here, I’d argue that that is only part of the account.
If you’ve ever visited Toronto, you will know a bit about its geography. It sits on a huge body of H2O [Lake Ontario] and is riddled with ravines. These are gorgeous, deep cut chasms left in their wild. If you are walking along St Clair Avenue, in the middle of interchange, shops, offices and cafes, you could lour a path at a bridge and find yourself in an entirely different class. Trees, bushes, shrubs, all manner of plant life await you along with the occasional defeat or fox. And it is amazingly quiet. The rumblings of interchange grow distant and at last you hear the songbirds. It’s a bit like achieving a different country of consciousness.
I love this image. Inside a real abbreviated distance of the polish, glistening towers of banks and businesses, the complicate of interchange, all creating an extraordinarily highly, polished aboveground, nature runs riot.
Doesn’t that make you remember what people are like? Each day, we dress up, putting on our public mask. And we drown, for a time, all the mutinous rumblings of our inner selves. How like Toronto is to its people!
Last year, Conduct in Question [the first in the Osgoode Trilogy] was published. Harry Jenkins is the protagonist lawyer practicing in Toronto. On reflection, I have to admit that Harry is a lot like the city I’ve just been describing. At the beginning of Conduct in Question he is treed in a creaky, old law firm low his adult partner’s finger and in a dead marriage of bill years. But mutinous rumblings lie inside Harry. I’m in my late forties. Am I running out of time? Can I make more money? How much money is enough?
And, what do you know? Harry is reserved, reticent, introspective and case to diffidence. On the polished aboveground of life, things aren’t so bad, but something is missing. It takes murder and fraud [catapulted down into the wilds of the ravines] to burst open his life and get him really living again. In the 2nd novel of the trilogy, Final Paradox, I got real interested in the role masks play in the lives of people. Harry is once again caught up in murder and fraud and this time the question is can love and forgiveness be found amid fraud and deceit? And so, [metaphorically speaking] Harry is blow down into the ravines of his psyche to come up with the answers.
So, yes, I believe I believe how a city [the setting] can become a character and also influence the other characters and themes in a novel. I’ve been greatly affected by the central image of Toronto with its polished, blase aboveground contrasted with what lurks low the bridges. That image is what lies low the Osgoode Trilogy.