Consolation, Michael Redhill

I do love books that take the time to explore my city, how it was built and who built it, and documenting the city is a big part of this novel, running parallel to a present-day story of a dying man and his loves. Together they express themes of love and death and release and the ways our stories intertwine so that we must tread with tender attention to others, past, present and future. You could use terms like exquisite and poignant to describe this novel and it has a strong staying power because of the vividness of the images, but it is the unseen that haunts it, since it is the story of a photographer and his creations, lost in a wreck in the now-infilled harbour which is under excavation for condos and may enshrine them in concrete. A novel about photographs is uniquely evocative, since the reader has to bring so much past experience to make sense of the images, and that means that we have to step into the story in a more intense way because it is painted with our own palate, in a sense. Death plays the same role in the parallel story of the present day; it is unseen, anticipated, but without any certainty, and the reader populates it with our own fears. Just as we let our minds be the silver plate on which these stories develop, so we infer our fears of death into the dying man and walk in his shoes in his quest for a dignified death, even as his bewildered family mistake his needs for their own, time and time again in their quest to keep him.
   I bought this copy remaindered at Book City (see earlier entries for proof of love) because I liked another of his books, Martin Sloane, which has similarly powerful descriptions of what almost amounts to a parallel world, and is also wonderful, about finding ways to make unbearable sadness bearable, but it's sad. Maybe it depends on mood, but I really do like stories to have some ray of light, some direction for the characters to go with dignity. I guess books like that become a kind of haven I can moor my storm-tossed bark in to bear witness to lives well-lived under heavy odds, and remember how much of suffering is optional. I read it here, in this library-soon-to-be-half-library.
   This book is big. I really liked it, and I'll remember it fondly, but, I can part with it.
Score = +1 (6 saved, 5 released)