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From
the beginning, one can tell that Michael Redhill is, besides
being an author, a poet. Each sentence is tight and beautiful,
even when he's describing birds crashing into glass buildings.
However, the characters are so cold, snippy, and closed off,
that sometimes they don't seem to deserve the beauty of Redhill's
prose.
Consolation
starts out with the suicide of protagonist David Hollis. Aside
from suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, which
the characters often mention by its more informal name, Lou
Gehrig's Disease), the historian has just published a monograph
about a maritime accident in nineteenth century Toronto. He
claims to have photographs rescued from the ship, but he mysteriously
refuses to provide the diary that purportedly goes along with
the photos. The accident occurred in a landfill turned future
stadium site, thus effectively covering up what could be an
important part of Toronto history.
Hollis's
widow, Marianne, takes up his research in an effort to understand
what drove her husband to his conclusion and suicide. She
is eventually assisted by her son-in-law John, who's just
trying to get his wife and her mother to come together and
deal with their grief. Just as ALS is a degenerative disease
that eventually results in the loss of all voluntary muscle
control, the ability of the Hollis family to communicate breaks
down. There is tremendous tension among the three living protagonists;
they always seem to speak to each other in clipped, sharp
jabs, as if trying to kill each other with thousands of pushpins.
It turns out that each, in some way, feels guilty for the
way they treated David and his research while he was alive.
Redhill
alternates sections of the Hollis' contemporary Toronto life
with the nineteenth century Toronto life of struggling pharmacist
Jem Hallam, the photographer of the plates Hollis found. In
some ways, the prose surrounding Jem seems more alive than
in sections surrounding the Hollis family. In a letter, Jem
writes "the golden-crowned thrushes are coming back and bringing
the best of spring." Compare that with the start of the book,
where the people who assist the crashing, migrating birds
"collect them and carry their stunned forms around in paper
bags." Perhaps Redhill is making a comment about the dull
nature of contemporary life with its glass buildings balanced
on landfills and families who refuse to connect even in the
face of tragedy.
The ALS
aspect forces an obvious comparison with a powerful piece
of American fiction: Rick Moody's Purple America. While
both manage to portray the horrors of ALS in a cold, clinical
light, Moody uses his characters' disaffection to great effect.
In Consolation, however, David Hollis doesn't want
anyone's pity; he just wants to stop people from covering
up the past. Right before his suicide, Hollis has trouble
opening a candy wrapper. The woman who helps him asks if he
has arthritis, and very matter-of-factly he states, "No…Lou
Gehrig's. Sometimes they work fine. But never in the mornings."
Consolation
is structured like an archeological site, as the reader, along
with Marianne, digs to uncover the truths of David Hollis's
life. Even motivations remain hidden until uncovered by the
actions of others. At its core, Consolation is a book
about one man's search for meaning, and how this search is
continued after his death by some of the very people who refused
to ascribe meaning to his life while he was alive.
(March,
2007)
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