Toronto flared briefly in the popular imagination last year. A mayor who smokes crack, who bowls over a seven-term councilwoman and who is challenged to an armwrestling duel by 80s WWF legend the Iron Sheik (now retired and using a wheelchair) will do that for a city. With the cancellation of the Rob Ford show, however, and no further sightings of Tiny Monkey in Posh Coat, Toronto appears to have receded from the limelight – reverting to its reputation for being, in the words of Steve Martin, like New York without all the stuff.

But fiction has a long memory. As opposed to say, film, where Toronto regularly stands in for other locations (then, ironically, hosts an A-list festival to show off all those movies that aren’t about it), in books, the city shines. It is, after all, the great city of English Canada, a nation almost determinedly circumspect and courteous even as it boils under the lid; so perhaps it is no surprise to discover it is on the page that this still-growing metropolis’s history, vanity and occasional tragedy find their voice.



It is also the world’s great immigrant city, its population exploding from less than 250,000 at the beginning of the last century to nearly 6 million today, and where even now roughly half its residents were born overseas. It is fitting that the greatest prose poem ever written to Toronto was penned by the Sri Lanka-born Michael Ondaatje. In the Skin of a Lion describes the city’s first growth spurt, in the 1930s, through the character Patrick Lewis’s efforts to build the Bloor Street viaduct (and later blow up the RC Harris Water Treatment Plant) among the Macedonian immigrants who were among the city’s first waves of new blood, and who spilled that blood to build it.

The viaduct – known locally as the suicide bridge, a nickname impervious to the protective barriers hastily erected to discourage any spontaneous great ideas – spans the Don River, what Robert Fulford called the Euphrates of Toronto books. Fulford charts its literary course better than I ever could:

Head to the east and you find yourself in Ernest Thompson Seton territory, where that great Victorian naturalist (a favourite of Margaret Atwood’s in childhood) did the private exploring that led to his classics, Wild Animals I Have Known and Two Little Savages. Follow the ravine south from the St Clair bridge as it joins the Don proper and soon you’ll reach Bloor Street, where (with a little imagination) you can see Michael Ondaatje’s characters from In the Skin of a Lion completing the construction of the Bloor viaduct in the 1930s. Keep going and you can glimpse, on the east bank that forms Riverdale Park, the lovers and dreamers who populate the young Morley Callaghan’s novels of the 1920s, like It’s Never Over, that intense account of claustrophobic urban frustration. Move on south to Gerrard and Dundas, glance to your right, and there are Hugh Garner’s defeated Cabbagetown dwellers, sitting on the grassy slopes as they endure the Depression and wonder whether to volunteer for the war in Spain. Not far away, you’ll run into the male protagonist of Catherine Bush’s 1993 novel, Minus Time, that wonderfully Toronto-centric book; he tells us that as a 13-year-old he ran away from home and lived in the ravines, becoming briefly famous in the papers as Ravine Boy. Keep going far enough, reach the lake, make a right, and eventually you can find a major Robertson Davies character, Boy Staunton from Fifth Business, dead at the bottom of Toronto harbour, sitting in his Cadillac convertible, his mouth inexplicably filled with a large chunk of pink granite.

Margaret Atwood is the city’s furious literary champion: determined to preserve its memory and to imagine its future

It is no surprise that the suicide which opens Margaret Atwood’s Man Booker prize-winning The Blind Assassin takes place in one of the city’s ravines. Like Ondaatje, the city’s other Booker winner, Atwood set out to give voice not just to the city’s history but to its myths and legends. She starts in those lush and vertiginous spaces – for this remains a Canadian megalopolis, ruled by trees – those enclaves hidden from view where the children of Cat’s Eye are free to express their budding cruelty; heads out to the Toronto islands, whose residents have often seemed to act as the city’s conscience while it amassed hidden but almost unbelievable wealth – “From here on the island, the city is mysterious like a mirage, like the cover on a book of science fiction”; and moves through the old money of Rosedale, the academic enclave of UofT, and bohemian Queen West in the late 1980s, now essentially an outdoor mall. If Robertson Davies made some of Toronto’s noblest literature with Fifth Business (which, in Boy Staunton, gave the city its Gatsby), Atwood is the city’s furious literary champion: determined to preserve its memory and, an accomplished SF writer herself, to imagine its future. She even weighed in against the Ford twins on Twitter over library closures. I’d love to see her take on the Iron Sheik.

Heavyweights notwithstanding, it is a truism that the key to Toronto’s personality is its endless, self-defeating obsession with being identified as a “world-class city”. It suffers, perhaps as the centre of Canadian media, or because of all the small-town arrivals hoping to make it in the Six, or just by proximity to New York (the kind of neighbour to which no city should have to compare itself) with taking itself a bit too seriously. Mordecai Richler, the legendary Montreal novelist, brillliantly popped the city’s ballooning ego with The Incomparable Atuk, an underrated comic masterpiece about a young Inuit boy who gets adopted by the city’s insufferable intelligentsia. But it is perhaps Sheila Heti’s fiction-memoir hybrid How Should a Person Be?, which follows the author’s crowd of Queen West artists and intellectuals, that best exemplifies Toronto’s love-hate affair with itself. This is a book that suffers from being, as a friend put it, “tediously self-reverential”, even while being punchy and funny and bracingly frank, especially about the city’s raunchy sex life. Heti shows up the hypocrisy of Toronto the Good, that bastion of Protestant uprightness where until recently you couldn’t buy liquor on credit; as do Tamara Faith Berger, whose Lie With Me still has the capacity to make me feel like a young boy, and Chester Brown, author of the maddening Paying for It, a graphic novel about his nerdy disavowal of courtly love and enthusiastic embrace of prostitutes. As he trawls Toronto’s alt-weekly sex ads and unnamed apartment buildings, Brown shows that the city may not always be pretty, but it works.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Giving voice to the city’s myths and legends ... Margaret Atwood photographed in Toronto, last June. Photograph: REX Shutterstock

There are many other brilliant books about Toronto. Timothy Findley’s dark and apocalyptic Headhunter, in which Conrad’s Kurtz takes over a stand-in for the Clark Institute of Psychiatry; David Gilmour’s Lost Between Houses, a coming-of-age tale set in the 60s, when the city itself was beginning to grow a wispy teen stache and wonder how it could be as cool as Montreal. Anne Michaels’s smash hit Fugitive Pieces is another great novel of urban immigrants, in this case Jewish survivors of Nazi Germany, while Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows takes us into the city’s Mennonite community. Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen by Kate Taylor is, again, partly set in wartime Toronto, and remains one of the more unappreciated Canadian novels of the new century, while Paul Quarrington’s hilarious hockey novel King Leary reminds us that the city is a mecca not just for ginger ale commercials but hockey rinks (of which it must have more in total than any city on earth), and Katrina Onstad’s How Happy to Be takes us inside a newspaper much like the National Post, the Conrad Black-founded organ where Onstad was a staffer. David Bezmozgis, Maggie Helwig, Dionne Brand … unlike so many of the city’s film-makers and musicians and painters, who get sucked down to the US, most of Toronto’s best authors stay, flourish and make the city their subject.



Some show it to us through the lens of speculative fiction: try Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, burning up bestseller lists at the moment, or Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, where a possibly unhinged activist tries to hack Kensington Market into a free WiFi zone, or The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson, a young adult masterwork; though for a younger children’s classic you can do no better than Jonathan Cleaned Up – Then He Heard a Sound, in which a TTC station appears in our hero’s living room.

The key to Toronto’s personality is its endless, self-defeating obsession with being identified as a “world-class city”

Jane Jacobs was not Canadian-born, and The Death and Life of Great American Cities does not mention Toronto. But the book’s famous urbanist principles – mixed-use neighbourhoods, small street blocks, and enough eyes on the street to make a community feel safe and vibrant – Jacobs subsequently found in the Annex neighbourhood, where she lived her last four decades: a rare celebrated New Yorker who moved north. For a less polemic bit of nonfiction urbanism, read Spacing magazine’s Shawn Micallef, who in Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto takes up Iain Sinclair’s mantle in a city paradoxically both walkable and sprawling. Or check out Concrete Toronto, which celebrates the city’s brutalist architecture, or The Ward, about Toronto’s first immigrant neighborhood, razed to make way for the new city hall. Sarah Liss (disclosure: we shared a high school) was highly praised for her oral history of queer activist Will Munro, the wonderfully named Army of Lovers: A Community History of Will Munro, the Artist, Activist, Impresario and Civic Hero Who Brought Together Toronto’s Club Kids, Art Fags, Hardcore Boys, Drag Queens, Rock ’n’ Roll Queers, Needlework Obsessives, Limpwristed Nellies, Stone Butches, New Wave Freaks, Unabashed Perverts, Proud Prudes and Beautiful Dreamers; and there is The People One Knows: Toronto Stories, by local early punk and zine chronicler Daniel Jones, who died of a drug overdose in a harbinger of what would happen to the alternative scene he loved, which is being progressively squeezed out with every new condo. While we’re down that particular back alley, the great editor Chris Frey suggests an honourable mention for David Cronenberg’s Videodrome: “Though a movie, I can think of no better tribute to weird Toronto, in that McLuhan meets Ballard kind of way. It is the greatest novel of Toronto not written.” And it’s got James Woods.

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Is there a theme to all this? Perhaps that Toronto does, deep down, know the true place of “Torontopia” in the grand ledger of world cities. Perhaps that it subconsciously wants its heroes to be flawed – the kind of place where the superheroes are just satirical takes on personality “profiles”, as in Andrew Kaufman’s All My Friends Are Superheroes, or indeed where a mayor could win an election partly on the sympathy engendered by being called (by sometime Guardian contributor John Barber) a “fat fuck”.

If that’s the case, then maybe there’s no better literary evidence of Toronto’s grudging self-deprecation than Scott Pilgrim, the most high-profile comic series ever to emerge from the city, and a rare example of a film actually set in Toronto (as well as starring a Toronto kind of movie star if ever there was one). In order to win Ramona’s hand, Scott has to defeat Gideon, Ramona’s ex-boyfriend, from New York City. Scott wins. Ramona swoons. But everyone still knows he’s a tool.

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