You have to read your city’s literature (and what a pleasure to say your city has a literature), but because my French is still painstaking enough to really slow the literary experience, I’m getting the Anglophone perspective on Montreal for now.
In John Brooke’s Last Days of Montreal, we step into a world where Montreal’s unique multiculturalism is interpreted as a network of divisions. Scattered across the mid-1990’s, around the time of the separation referendum, Anglophones feel ostracized and transgressive for simply flying the Canadian flag. Communication breaks down with their French wives, and they look for connection with their immigrant neighbors. French radio hosts try to mythicize the everyday flying of the fleur-de-lis, but the people they are mythicizing don’t recognize themselves in the story. And homeless men stop suicides and think that they’re in love with their rescuees, who think they’re in love with trees, and junkies plan to move to Toronto because they can’t communicate with their families, and every individual in this colorfully-peopled world seems to be struggling with their relation to community. Which community, the reader sees in aggregate, appears darker, more mysterious and with more internal division and opacity than any of its members can appreciate. It’s a salient perspective on a city of languages and how those contrasts define its people.
And as one would hope, eventually the network of community exposes some shocking or tragic turns to the reader that none of its members can see from their limited perspective. And as one would hope, our characters end up a little more self-defined by virtue of their struggles against a community in turmoil.
The book’s objective can be its weakness, too — the tone can seem indulgently dark sometimes, full of drugs, prostitution, infidelities and loneliness (although I must admit, I’m seeing all the intersections Brooke is describing in 2018, and 1995 was a different world, in literal terms, and psychic ones, too, for the Anglophone community at the height of separatism). The dialogue seems to reach too hard for that literary loadedness sometimes and slips sensibility.
But a worthy perspective to absorb, all in all, getting to know a place. I hear John Brooke still lives around the Jean Talon market, writing mysteries. I wonder if I won’t see him sometime there, contemplating life’s darknesses, buying peppers.