Originally from Saskatchewan, Michael Helm, now a teacher at York University, is the author of The Projectionist, which was a Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, and In the Place of Last Things, a regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. With Cities of Refuge, he breaks away from the Prairie-fuelled earlier novels. Helm sat down with The Globe and Mail's Alison Gzowski to talk about his latest venture.
Where did the idea for this book come from?
I know exactly where the last two books started, the sentence or image they stared with, but this one has been torn down and built back up again so many times I don't think there's any original lumber left in it. For a long time, I wanted to write about Toronto because it's the place I've lived the longest and I am interested in cities of this size ... open cities in this moment.
What is this moment?
Well, the start of the 21st century, the open city, for the usual reasons people find a city interesting, the mix of histories and stories and languages, the surfaces of the place, the so-called erotics of public spaces. But also because I also think it's true that almost anything can count as character in fiction, in the way that landscape can be character in Thomas Hardy. And I think cities sort of work in fiction the way people do, that they have an outward part of themselves that is a promotion of a mythology and a much more interesting and richer interior. And I know the city, I think I know it pretty well and have enough intuitions about it as well. It's full of dramatic possibilities, I think.
Michael Helm: 'I think as a novelist you have to risk a lot of things.'— The Globe and Mail
The city is a character here, because at one point you say it's giving and taking, or at least a character does.
Yeah, Kim [the protagonist] thinks about it. This book seems to be promoting the idea that the city is plural, that the experience of a 28-year-old grad school dropout is different than that of a young Colombian man here illegally or an Anglican priest, except in this GPS sense – they don't live in the same place, they live in different places. And she comes to wonder, after she's attacked by an unknown assailant while working at what she calls the nexus of many bad histories, I think she wonders if she's breathed in some essence of dire luck. So she comes to be somewhat superstitious about it. Her task in this book is to square the reality that she used to know with the reality that she now knows. And she's wondering how they can be of the same substance really.
There's the reality of her sense of the city and the reality of who she thinks her father is.
Yes, and there's also the reality of who she was before the attack and who she was after the attack. The hardest part for her in that part of the book is to imagine her attacker, which will take a great deal of courage, and in the end she thinks she might be doing that in a character she designates just with the letter R. He becomes a kind of a guide for her in these months after the attack, and she decides that she's going to trust her intuitions as a writer when she didn't trust her intuitions on the night of the attack, when she might have walked north to the busier streets and instead walked down a dark one.
Harold, the father, is fact-driven and he says to her that fiction fails history. And he's a liar.
Yes. I think of him as a kind of high-functioning coward. He's made a lot of mistakes in his life, the biggest of which, he thinks, is his failure in a vital moment, in the face of sheer brute power, back in the 1970s.
How did you get inside somebody who has been attacked?
Um...
Are you rolling your eyes at me?
No.
That's a huge leap of imagination isn't it?
