Readers of Timothy Taylor will know that the “where” of a story has always been of prime importance in his fiction, arguably as essential as the “who.”
In his novels, that “where” has been unabashedly Vancouver, where Taylor lives. His debut novel, Stanley Park, explored the city’s rich-poor divide and its preoccupation with food: eating well for the rich; simply eating for the homeless. In Story House, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside leaped off the pages, as did the city’s obsession with real estate.
His new novel, The Blue Light Project, marks a departure. The story – which revolves around a hostage-taking during a live studio broadcast of a Canadian Idol-type talent show called KiddieFame – is not set in Vancouver, or in any named or identifiable place. It’s Any City, Canada. Or Any City, U.S.A.
This is televised terror, a story that could happen anywhere and be told everywhere. This is globalization. This is our story, happening to all of us.
“I wanted this to be a city where everybody lived,” Taylor, 47, said during a recent interview in his book- and art-filled office. He has kept an office in a heritage building on the edge of the Downtown Eastside since he gave up banking for writing full time. The career move has worked out – and then some. Stanley Park was a bestseller, and short-listed for the Giller Prize in 2001; the movie rights were optioned by actor Bruce Greenwood (that option has since lapsed).
Story House was also a bestseller. And Taylor is a busy and prolific freelance writer, focusing mostly on culture, travel, food and business (he writes a regular column for The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business magazine).
The Blue Light Project is set in the near future, 2013. The hostage crisis at the Meme Media complex drags on for three days; the assailant offers no clues as to motive. Meanwhile the information-starved television news coverage continues around the clock, and protests and police enforcement escalate on the square outside the television studios. The chaos is contagious.
The real-life event that immediately comes to mind is the 2002 siege at a crowded Moscow theatre, which was carried out by Chechen terrorists and which left 170 people dead.
That tragedy was very much on Taylor’s mind when writing the book, even more so when paired with an experience in a Dublin theatre five years later. Invited by the Dublin Writers Festival in 2007 to deliver an essay about that city (it was an exchange with the Vancouver International Festival of Writers and Readers), he was in the audience enjoying a reading by IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Per Petterson, when a man burst into the theatre.
Taylor was immediately reminded of the Chechen hostage crisis: “One of the most chilling and yet riveting common themes that ran through survivors’ accounts is that they would say they thought it was part of the show when these guys came running in.” (The man in Dublin, it turned out, was harmless; he had just stumbled into the wrong theatre.)
In creating his mid-sized Everycity for the book, Taylor was heavily influenced by Minneapolis and Vancouver, with a bit of Chicago thrown in. But he ultimately constructed a fictional city with made-up neighbourhood names and geography.
“I had to draw little maps for myself and just start putting the thing together physically. I didn’t get too geeky about it with measuring exact distances or anything, but … that’s how I built it. It felt like I was doing a literary SimCity,” he says.
