http://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2007... ( )

This book tells the connected stories of the Hollis family (1997) and Jem Hallam (1857). It also tells the early history of the city of Toronto.

David Hollis is a historian/geographer interested in Toronto's early development. He has ALS and commits suicide early in the book, leaving behind a firm conviction that a pictoral history of Toronto has been created and preserved in a shipwreck -- with the ship buried beneath what is now prime lake front realty. His wife and daughters are dealing with David's death, and the fiance of the elder daughter, who was especially close to David, is dealing with his own feelings and his seeming inability to console his fiance or her mother.

Jem Hallam arrives in Toronto in the 1850s to begin work as a chemist (pharmacist) and save enough money to bring his wife and daughters to Toronto. He fails in that effort, but creates a new career (photography) and quasi-family for himself by joining forces with two other people struggling on their own in the new city.

This is a well written book that explores both social issues (historical preservation vs. development, poverty) and personal struggles such as dealing with loss and failure.

Both of the stories, told in alternating sections, are compelling and they come together in a surprising way -- making the last part of the book my favourite part of all. ( )

Michael Redhill’s novel Consolation is a book with several faces. It is a miniature history of the city of Toronto, a mystery of the non-murder sort, and a touching character study that focuses on the attempts of two groups of people, separated by more than a century, who are forced to deal with life’s adversities when they least expected to have to do so.

David Hollis is a university historian, a late twentieth century man obsessed by his city’s history and the people who lived in it before him. He has become convinced that a complete set of the earliest photographs ever taken of the city of Toronto was lost in a storm just offshore and that they are now buried under streets built on reclaimed land that was once part of Lake Ontario. He has dedicated his life to identifying the Toronto of the 1850s that is hidden by the Toronto of today, but when he finds that he has Lou Gering’s disease he knows that he has little time left to convince anyone of authority to help him find the lost photographic plates.

Jem Hallam is newly arrived in the Toronto of 1855, sent to the city from London to start a new pharmacy at the direction of his father. Hallam left behind a wife and two daughters, hoping that they would join him in Toronto as soon as the business began to show a profit. Things do not go well for Jem Hallam and, although he is never seems quite sure how it all happened, he eventually finds himself in the photography trade and living with a dying photographer and a woman he took into his life in order to save her from a sure death on the streets of the city.

In alternating segments, the reader is able to follow both the efforts of David Hollis to identify the possible location of the missing plates and the evolution of Jem Hallam from failed pharmacist to successful photographer. Hollis, becoming more and more helpless at the hands of the cruel disease he suffered, and finding little support in his quest from colleagues, decided to end his life. It is left up to his wife and his daughter and her fiancé to try to salvage his reputation as they try to stop the construction of a new sports facility on the very spot identified by Hollis as likely to be the final resting place of this important record of Toronto’s early history.

Redhill seamlessly moves back and forth between the stories of these two men whose lives have become intertwined despite the fact that they lived more than a century apart. Jem Hallam, forced to fight for his survival in a manner he had no way to foresee when he arrived in Toronto, and feeling guilty for carving out a new life for himself with strangers while abandoning his wife and daughters in London to the care of his father, eventually produces the photos that David Hollis will so desperately search for in the future. Or did he? That’s where the mystery begins.

Rated at: 4.0 ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

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.

Half of Consolation's story, then, is of the remaining Hollis family -- of the mother and daughter's conflicting reactions to the patriarch's controversial suicide, of the husband/son-in-law stuck in the middle, of a groundbreaking of a new sports arena that might finally provide an answer to the question once and for all. And all this is interesting enough, but then Redhill sets an entire half of the novel back in the 1850s as well, among the photographic crew responsible for those photos that might or might not still exist, painting a vivid historical picture of Toronto while also explaining the circumstances behind the photos themselves. It's this half that's the real treat for fans of historical fiction, like I am -- Redhill has quite a solid handle over this particular style of writing, and has created a complex tale here that is sure to be making Canadian librarians and historians pee in their pants as we speak. Packed into Consolation's Victorian half is a dense look at all the issues that made up the day; the different role pharmacists had back then, the perils of being a young unmarried female, the ongoing problem of runaway slaves from America in those days, the accidental discovery in those years of silver nitrate as a photographic medium, etc etc etc.

At the same time, though, the modern half of Consolation serves as a nice contemporary character study as well, which is what I think makes the book so intriguing -- that it's not just a historical thriller, not just a dysfunctional-family drama, but both at the same time, with both stories based on the same set of physical objects at their center. Neither story is outstanding on their own, even though both are technically solid; it's the combining of the two into one uberplot that is the real pleasure. And like I said, Consolation is not just a tight story with intriguing characters, but a real history lesson about Toronto as well; and by extension, of course, a look in general at the rise, fall, and re-rise of certain large cities in North America, showing how the tide of history (first the Industrial Age and then the Information one) had such a profound impact on how people in the Western world have chosen to live together over the course of the last 150 years.

I know that I've only made it through a third of this year's Booker nominees at this point, and that ones I'm undoubtedly going to like a lot are still on the wait list (for example, such as Nicola Baker's supposed genre-bending Darkmans, which I keep hearing I'm apparently going to love as soon as I can actually get my hands on it); that said, Consolation is so far my favorite of all the 2007 Booker nominees I've read, and the one I would vote for today if someone was to force me to vote today. I hope you're enjoying these Booker-nominee reviews, and do make sure to look for the next one tomorrow, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (the one many people consider this year's favorite).

Out of 10:
Story: 8.9
Characters: 8.5
Style: 7.3
Overall: 8.2 ( )

After a week's delay, I finally finished this book -- I was called away from home and forgot to take it with me. Anyway, I will be very blunt here and tell you that at first I almost just put the book down because it did not hold my interest. After I got into the story of Jeremy Hallam, however, I regained said lost interest & was mesmerized.

Before I offer a look inside (don't worry, as always, no spoilers), I have to say that Redhill is a gifted author with great talent. His prose is incredible; small descriptions of light shining on the water, for example, are so realistic that you can truly see it in your mind's eye. His characterizations are very well drawn and once I settled into the book, it was a true pleasure to read.

There are two stories here. David Hollis, an historian of some local note, has died, a suicide. He leaves behind a wife, Marianne, two daughters and a son-in-law (or fiance -- I'm not sure) John, who was very close to David. As the story opens, the family is dealing with its loss and its grief, each in in his or her own way. Marianne, for example, has taken up in a Toronto hotel overlooking a construction project and will not leave. Her husband had said that he had proof that a steamship had gone down in the 1850s, and that in the wreckage there would be a set of glass plates with a pictorial panorama of the city at the time on them. This wreckage and the plates become his holy grail, but no one was paying attention to him. Now, Marianne is waiting and watching for the construction workers to unearth the wreckage where her husband said it would be, and will not leave until something turns up to prove him right -- or at least until she can get around what kept her husband so preoccupied the last years of his life. Her son-in-law is the only one who will visit or talk to her; he becomes involved in her quest by ferreting out information. But he has his own need to deal with David's loss.

The second story is that of Jem Hallam, who comes to Toronto in the 1850s to start a new life and bring his family business to the area. Leaving his wife & children behind, he soon has to come to grips with who he has become in this new place.

It is a marvelous story, a look at how people deal with loss and grief, each in his or her own way. There is a wonderful plot twist along the way which I never saw coming -- once you get to that point, all is made very clear.

So, who would like this book? Well, I'd think people who are interested in history would like it; people who are interested in the topic of loss & grief would really enjoy it. Anyone who loves good writing should also read this one. I would definitely recommend it.

Booker Prize winner? Probably not; however, it is well worth every second of reading time. ( )