In the Skin of a Lion

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Three years later, Clara's friend Alice unexpectedly arrives and tells Patrick that Clara's mother might know where Clara is. Images as powerful and poignant as a dream, narrative that slips and weaves and ducks between people, places and time, and an impressive sweep of invention that catches the breath. I have a certain amount of tolerance for novelists flitting from one character's perspective to another, or one point of time to another. In the winter, anonymous groups of foreign loggers come to Patrick’s town to cut down trees, and Patrick observes them from afar. Though sparingly described, they seem more familiar than the characters so exhaustively cataloged in much pomo fiction.

Patrick confronts Harris about his extravagance and his project that caused so many men to die building it. Patrick witnesses a performance in which an actor repeatedly smashes her hand against the stage and rushes forward to help her.Although the details of her last moments are not known until the end of the novel, Patrick later recounts that she died because she mistakenly grabbed a bag in the street that contained a bomb. In the meantime, Commissioner Harris, focused only on the beauty of what he is building, shows absolutely no concern for the dangerous and unsanitary conditions in which his workers are forced to toil. Harris and Pomphrey at the far end looked on helplessly as one nun was lifted up and flung against the compressors. It depicts the bloody history behind the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct (that you use every day when the Subway passes from Braodview and Castle Frank Station) as well as the R. When they go to Clara’s friend Alice Gull’s country house for a few days, Patrick learns more about Clara’s past life, and in particular her erotic anecdotes, but he feels that a part of her will always remain out of his reach.

They fraternize at a party for the rich, then steal a multimillion-dollar yacht from a couple they chloroform. It has so much action and so much poetry: far-flung lovers (not an Ever After, but a Right Now [Since we are human, Connection is SO IMPORTANT! Even if he were to tell her that there is a castle outside, she would have to believe him, because they are driving through the countryside in darkness, and she has no way of looking out to see for herself.Ondaatje's novel is fiction, but filled with real events which took place in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada during that time: the construction of the Prince Edward Viaduct between Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue; suppression of workers strikes and demonstrations by the police chief Dennis Draper; the murders of Viljo Rosvall and Janne Voutilainen, two Finnish-Canadian labor unionists, and the mysterious disappearance of Ambrose Smalls - a famous theare magnate who owned several venues across Ontario, and whose disappearance was never solved (even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was involved in it at one time, but ultimately chose not to pursue the case). At the time, I thought he was a romantic figure; now I think of this revenant as some version of myself that I tried to kill, but could not, in the spring of 1987.

They had passed the black car under the trees and talking cheerfully stepped past the barrier into a landscape they did not know existed - onto a tentative carpet over the piers, among the night labourers. If writing is being haunted by your own ghost, then In the Skin of a Lion is haunted by the visionaries and builders of the fiction that is the modern city.

It just irks me, and a lot of fellow young Canadian readers I know I can speak for, that this kind of thing gets all the attention.

It jumps sometimes to a few other characters, such as Nicolas Temelcoff, with all of these characters related to Patrick’s narrative in some way. e., illumination of the Finnish loggers, moonlight, when Caravaggio is learning to become a thief in total darkness, Patrick's removal of the lamp when breaking into the water plant, the lights being turned off during the final dialogue between Patrick and Harris. That’s a lot of issues written down against short praise, but the experience of this writing, the Canadian setting, and sections of the book where I really did care about characters and what happened mean this is actually a strong 4 stars for me.Patrick’s storytelling thus opens and concludes the novel, putting his memories and his narrative voice at the forefront. This is not about fidelity or infidelity so much as about the impossibility of knowing someone, let alone owning them - though it is possible to love them, all the same. Ondaatje does things with language that should be almost illegal, giving us scenes that can be at the same time lush and heartbreakingly stark, weaving in and out of different timeframes and contexts with the fluidity and free association of memory.