Michael Ondaatje · 1987 · coming-of-age
Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel, about the people who built Toronto and were left out of the photographs. Patrick Lewis comes down from the Ontario bush and works on the Bloor Street Viaduct and in the tunnel under the lake - among Macedonians and Finns and Italians whose names are in no record of the work they did.
- 1Bellrock
A boy on a farm near Depot Creek watching Finnish loggers skating the river at night with cattails burning in their hands - the image the whole book grows out of, and the last of his childhood.
- 2The Muskoka bush
His father blows stumps and then rock for the logging companies, and Patrick learns dynamite from him - a trade that will matter a great deal more later than either of them can see at the time.
- 3The Bloor Street Viaduct
Toronto, 1917, and the bridge going up over the Don Valley - and a nun blown off the unfinished span at night and caught in the dark by a worker hanging from a rope, which is the scene everyone remembers.
- 4The waterworks tunnel
The intake tunnel driven out under Lake Ontario to the Harris filtration plant, dug by men in the dark for wages - the labour the city is built on, and which the city's own history does not record.
- 5Toronto
Patrick comes out of prison with dynamite and a plan for the waterworks, and stands in Commissioner Harris's own building at the end unable to finish it - and tells the story instead, which is what the book is.