“The joyful will stoop with sorrow,
and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake,
I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion” – The Epic of
Gilgamesh
In the Skin of A Lion is a story
about stories. It begins with a brief description of a girl in a car being told
a story. The reader will often wonder who these people in the car are until
they realize that the story they are reading is the same.
This book is also the story of
Toronto and her people. The people that helped build her and whose stories are
the fabric of its history. From the building of the Bloor Viaduct to the R.C.
Harris Water Treatment Plant. The story of Nicholas Temelcof who swung from the
unfinished bridge and saved the falling nun was my favorite chapter. The way in
which his effortless movements are described and the moment of bodily impact is
poetic. I’m not the only one that was moved by this passage as Anne Enright
describes in her 2007 Guardian article “The fallen nun” Ondaatje’s prose was
what helped her become an author herself.
Patrick, outsider and immigrant
from the harsh Canadian countryside, becomes our linking point between all the
characters in the novel. And although he links the stories together he “has always
been alien, the third person in the picture.” He’s not the hero of this book,
he’s the everyday man, the labourer, the stranger in his own land. He’s also
the man in the car telling the story.
For me the book is best described
as though it were a dream. The characters introduced at random, the plot not in
chronological order. Which parts are true and which are “truth”. How much of
our story and our city’s story is invented or embellished? Like the painted
roof of the prison where we first meet Caravaggio the lines are blurred.
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