You an author?” the immigration officer asks me, when I explain that I have
come to Toronto to read at the Harbourfront.
I nod, not wanting to make too much of it. You can never be sure with
immigration men.
“Awesome,” he says.
This is what it means to visit a great literary city. No wonder Margaret
Atwood and Michael Ondaatje have made their homes here. Week in, week out,
the Harbourfront invites writers from every corner of the globe to read from
their work; and week in, week out, Torontans turn up to hear them. I am
knocked out. So mad are they on authors here that even immigration
officials, normally the most cynical of men, consider the experience of
meeting one “awesome”. Not interesting, not a privilege, but “awesome”.
The following morning when I tell the waitress I’ll be having a cooked as
opposed to a continental breakfast, she smiles at me. “Awesome,” she says.
A travelling author’s life is full of these disappointments. The panoramic
view the hotel offered me is a panorama of nothing: Lake Ontario is a great
grey blank, the string of fuzzy low-slung islands, serviced by empty
ferries, like a chin beard on an otherwise featureless face. Outside the
hotel the city is as though petrified – not just unseasonably cold but
deserted, nobody promenading by the lake, nobody on the downtown streets,
which are cut off from the city proper by the desolate concrete viaducts and
underpasses that are the automobile’s gift to the pedestrian. And on top of
that my cooked breakfast is cold. One of the reasons you come to Canada is
bacon. But not cold bacon.
We are not, everyone tells me, seeing Toronto at its best. The spring cannot,
will not, break through. But this is not bracing winter weather either.
Small flakes of snow drift about without conviction. People shiver but don’t
wrap up. There is no colour anywhere, no green on the trees, no flowers, not
much in the way of neon or billboarding. When Trollope came to Toronto he
complained of the “parallelogrammical” streets, “not a single curvature to
rest the eye”. But I don’t want my eye rested, I want it excited. Normally
one complains of the visual garishness of cities; in Toronto one longs for
it.
All this, of course, is first-impression disillusionment. Little by little you
learn to modify your expectations. The bacon is going to be cold everywhere
(don’t ask me why), so don’t eat it. At street level the city is unfavoured,
so look up. It might not quite be Chicago, but the skyscape is still
thrilling, and if you have to see snow eddying aimlessly when it should be
spring, I recommend seeing it eddying aimlessly around the austerely
harmonious black towers of Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto-Dominion Centre.
And when you have had enough looking up, the smart thing to do is look down.
Like every Canadian city, Toronto is a maze of underground food courts linked
by pathways of shops, and the quality of what you eat and buy determined by
the nature of the building you happen to find yourself under. For the
visitor this can be its own fun – trying to work out where beneath the city
you might at any time be from the subterranean decor. A recent Canadian film
told of people competing to stay underground, and it isn’t hard to see the
appeal of never coming out. You beat the weather this way, it takes fewer
people underground to give the impression of purposeful bustle, and the
cheap food down is better than the cheap food up.
AFTER A FEW DAYS, I work out that you have to aim very purposefully for the
stylish to enjoy this city. It’s much more pleasant to wander round an
uptown suburb like Yorkville, where the designer shops are, than it is to
stroll downtown by the water and the underpasses. If it’s a decent glass of
wine you feel like, or a cup of tea that isn’t a bag dropped in a paper
Starbucks cup, go to the Four Seasons hotel in Yorkville, which is a good
Canadian thing to do anyway, since the Four Seasons empire began here. And
get someone to point the way to King or Queen Street West, where the groovy
folk hang out and where I am lucky enough to be invited to lunch twice, on
both occasions in cavernous warehouses: all exposed ducting, sanded
floorboards and steel tables. They do this icy, whiplash sophistication well
here; again no colour, barely any decoration, and a sort of frontier quiet.
Whether you can make a vibrant city out of putting few people into elegantly
designed vast spaces, I doubt. The cities we love best are tumbles of
habitation greedily fought over. But it can be calming not to have to climb
over other diners to get to your table, to be served by waiters with the
wilderness in their eyes, and not to have to rip at your food before someone
else can steal it.
The only hot, hugger-mugger, European-feeling restaurant we eat in is Joso’s,
sometimes referred to as the “breast restaurant” on account of the number of
paintings and sculptures of mammaries, usually in conjunction with paintings
and sculptures of fish and octopus, that adorn the blood-red walls. Joso was
once half of a well-known Toronto folk-singing duo – Malka and Joso: she
from Israel, he from Yugoslavia. So the restaurant which commemorates that
partnership is understood to epitomise the city’s creative cosmopolitanism.
Toronto, remember, is thought to be the most multicultural city on earth.
Outside the elegant neoclassical columns of Union Station (an exquisite
example of beaux-arts design dreaming of the vast frontier), a plaque
recalls Trudeau’s assertion that “there is no official culture... No citizen
or group of citizens is other than Canadian...” And certainly when you walk
the streets, above or below ground, it is not difficult to be convinced that
representatives of all humankind are here. The catch with multiculturalism,
though, is that it of necessity lacks an aesthetic. When it comes to the
look of a place, everywhere is nowhere.
Hence the joy of Joso’s, which might be Canada in actuality but in imagination
is the Adriatic. A deep-cleavaged waitress, very much in the spirit of the
naked paintings, brings a quivering plate of fish, the spoils of the seven
seas, for us to choose from. There are more colours on this one plate than
in the rest of Toronto put together. And more tastes. I choose barramundi
and with the first mouthful all the depressing smells and flavours of the
North American continent to which I have been subjected for days – the
sweet, syrupy breakfast odours, the glut of roasted coffee, footlingly sweet
confections served at the wrong hour, cardboard wraps stuffed with mush,
bread you could construct a multistorey hostel for the homeless from – are
forgotten. This is what you want a free city to do when freedom is its only
aesthetic: make possible the sensual pleasures of somewhere else.
Thawed out by Joso’s we grow bolder, surface more often, even though the
temperature is locked on four degrees, and hop between galleries and
museums, of which the best turns out to be the Bata Shoe Museum, which
sounds like a desperation venue but isn’t. The collection, as much a history
of human vanity as of footwear, is beautifully housed in a playful shoe-box
construction by the Canadian architect Moriyama, just a stone’s throw from
Libeskind’s not yet finished exploding-crystal extension to the Royal
Ontario Museum. Conscious, presumably, of its native dourness, the city is
wildly encouraging these architectural jeux d’esprit. Even the Art Gallery
is three-quarters closed, pending completion of a facelift on the Bilbao
scale by Frank Gehry, himself a son of Toronto. Not just an awesome
literature city, you see, but soon to be an awesome art and architecture
city too.
With so much in suspense – condominiums waiting to go up all over town, spring
playing peekaboo, and a dozen architectural marvels not yet in bloom – I
wonder if it is fair on the place that I should be visiting it at all right
now. Shouldn’t judgment also be held back until the trees bud and the museum
boom hits?
THE SOUL of a place, though, is the soul of a place. A collection of
contemporary Inuit art in one of Mies van der Rohe’s buildings suggests a
people whose dependency on the sea was very different from Joso’s. Women and
sea creatures lie entwined, sometimes indistinguishable from one another,
but no octopus with a hundred greedy suckers embraces a bare-breasted maiden
from the shores of the Adriatic. Wrong climate for any of that. Whether
Canada’s aboriginal inhabitants were constitutionally cheerless is not for
me to say, but there appears to be no instinct for merriment embedded in
Toronto. The people I meet here are better mannered and far more patient
than any I normally encounter in my line of work. I can see why writers love
coming to Toronto. You are given an intelligent hearing. Conversation flows
sweetly. You want everyone you talk to to be your friend for life. But the
price of this civilised mannerliness is a society that appears to be
becalmed. You notice it on the streets. Nobody is shouting on a mobile
phone. Nobody is barging you for pavement space or challenging you for the
air you breathe. The city’s clock is not ticking.
In a cafe in Kensington Market, once the Jewish quarter, now a free-for-all
bohemia where no shop sells what it says it sells, two women are having the
slowest conversation I have ever heard. “There’s a light,” says one, “that
almost throws itself out.” “That,” says the other, looking at the ceiling,
“might just be Nirvana.” Even at the baseball stadium nobody raises their
voice, not even to support their own side, supposing they know, or indeed
care, who their own side is.
“Have you noticed,” my wife says on our seventh day in Toronto, “that there’s
no assumption of ill will here?” And she’s right. Where are the security
guards, the bouncers, the police? Why have we barely heard a siren all week?
As I prepare to leave, I realise I have not been so unwound in years. Insane
of me to suppose you can only have a good time in a city always on the edge
of a collective nervous breakdown. What’s so wrong with slow, calm, and
quietly waiting for it all to happen? Nothing. Except for the fear, if
frenzy is what you’re used to, that what you’re waiting to happen perhaps
never will.
Travel details: Howard Jacobson travelled to Toronto as a guest of Tailor
Made Travel. Six nights at the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel starts at
£699 per person, based on two sharing, room only, including flights from
Gatwick.
There are nonstop flights to Toronto from 11 UK airports, as well as Dublin
and Shannon. Airlines include Air Canada (0871 220 1111, www.aircanada.com)
and British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com);
fares from about £380. Or try the no-frills carriers Air Transat (00 800
2838 7673, www.airtransat.co.uk),
Fly Globespan (0871 271 0415, www.flyglobespan.com)
and Zoom (0870 240 0055, www.flyzoom.com);
from about £250.
The Four Seasons (00 800 6488 6488, www.fourseasons.
com) is the most stylish hotel in the city; doubles from £139. Or try
the hip Drake Hotel (00 1 416 531 5042, www.thedrakehotel.ca);
doubles from £88.
If you’d prefer a package, BA Holidays (0870 243 3406, www.ba.com/holidays)
has four nights at the Four Seasons from £652pp, with flights from Heathrow.
Or try Canadian Affair (020 7616 9177, www.canadian-affair.com).
Joso’s restaurant (00 1 416-925 1903, www.josos.com)
has fishy mains from £10. For a feast of fusion, there’s Susur (603 2205, www.susur.com),
about £45 per head.
