Toronto author and Giller Prize nominee Michael Redhill wrote his second novel, Consolation, out of both adoration and frustration for the city he calls home. The book trails the discovery of buried treasure—a comprehensive series of photographs from 1850s Toronto that are said to be hidden beneath the downtown core—by fictional historian David Hollis. Following his suicide, polar opposites Marianne (Hollis’ widow) and John Lewis (his daughter’s fiancé) team up to find out what, if anything, actually lies within the excavation site. The haunting tale unfolds through interrelated stories: the contemporary storyline follows Marianne and Lewis as they seek out the truth behind Hollis’ assertions, while a parallel historical narrative traces the transformation of J.G. Hallam, an English apothecary who has come to Toronto to find a better life. The struggles of Victorian and Miller-era Toronto, Redhill suggests, are not all that different. Here, the poet, publisher and playwright—his award-winning play Goodness will soon debut in Manhattan—reflects on flexing his Victorian lit muscle, his reasons for writing the book, and the ego issues of our approval-seeking metropolis.

Consolation took you six years to complete. Can you talk about your writing process?

I started writing it after I finished Martin Sloane. There was a lot of research involved and I write fairly slowly. I also rewrite a lot. I wrote a number of drafts of the book. There were a lot of structural issues that I had to struggle with as I worked further into the first draft, trying to figure out how to balance things out. There were certain resonances between the two stories, and I wanted to make sure that they were there without being too blunt or obvious. It should not take this long to write a book.

When you start writing with all of that information, a lot of the research shows up on the page—and that doesn’t make for very good fiction. There was a lot of work to do in successive drafts to pare away the factual details and leave a tone behind. Because it’s the tone, I think, that convinces a reader of the reality of something, rather than layers of detail. There are layers of detail, obviously, in the 1850s story, but not compared to what there had been. It’s a process of layering and it does take a long time. As a writer you have to be able to leave it alone long enough to be able to go back to it a couple of months later and read it with some objectivity.

Did you choose to write Consolation with two storylines to show that there was, in fact, something that came before the present?

Yes, and also to show somebody becoming aware of a place in time. In the story from the 1850s, Hallam, through his own bad luck, ends up having to become a witness, and he turns into somebody who begins to really look at the place he lives in. He’s not entirely sure he’s happy with what he sees; he’s anxious about what sort of purpose the current civic fathers want to put his photographs to. There’s the idea that this was the very first time in its history that Toronto thought it could become “world-class,” and the way the city was viewed was more important than the way the city actually was.

It feels as if Toronto would be satisfied with being able to promulgate the illusion that it’s world-class, without actually doing anything in and of itself to become world-class in the eyes of its own citizens. Part of the reason that the book is divided into the two sections is that you have one person who represents the first time that the city’s own ego threatened its well-being, and then, in the present, you have a story where something similar is happening.

One thing that really stood out to me was that the fight being fought in 1850s Toronto was essentially the same battle being waged in modern Toronto.

That was intentional. I still find it very hard to define the character of this place. I also wanted to transform the city into a place where it’s possible to feel joyful. It just so often feels to me that there’s this conflict. One of the typical paradigms of this city is that we get massively excited when Americans come here, when celebrities come here and they talk about how great our city is, or during the Toronto International Film Festival or the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront, but we don’t actually value these things themselves. We value them because others think they’re great and, if they didn’t, we would quickly dump them.

Are you comfortable writing in Victorian vernacular?

I never thought it was going to be something I would be comfortable with, but I wrote a play a few years back called Building Jerusalem, which was set in Toronto in 1899. It was a story with characters contemporary to the time, and I found myself having to write in those voices. This time I had some of that muscle already developed and depended on it to create something believable. I’m not a Victorianist; I’ve never really deeply studied the time except for my own purposes and it doesn’t interest me naturally. For this project I had to go there. I don’t think I ever want to write about that time period again.

The word “consolation” is clearly laden with significance. What does it mean in the context of the title?

There’s an act of consolation at the centre of the book. As well, the characters past and present are bereft of something; they need to turn to each other in this place, which resists them, and they feel cut adrift a little. They rely on one another to help make meaning out of what’s happened to them. For me, that act of consolation is an important one that happens in both the past and present stories.

Did Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, another historical novel about Toronto, influence you at all?

I wasn’t influenced by any books that were written about or set in Toronto, so much as I was influenced by the belief that every city deserves its own story. When you look at other cities in the world, you can often find a bizarre, fictional autobiography that’s written through time about the city by the writers who have lived in it—because they set their stories there and they explore the city in different time periods. You get to see that city grow through the eyes of its intellectual classes, through its writers and artists. It’s another symptom of Toronto’s resistance to itself. That’s the great contradiction about this city: it’s a city with a huge ego but very little self-awareness. How does that end up manifesting itself in the life of the city? I think what you see is a very schizophrenic place. I think one thing its artists can do is try to take control of the city’s story and—through fiction or through art—transform it into something more permanent, because we’re constantly erasing the past here. Art has a chance of making things stay around a little longer. That’s what motivated me. However great In the Skin of a Lion is, however, it wasn’t an inspiration for Consolation.

Do you like Toronto?

Yes, I like Toronto. It’s interesting because the reception of the book has given the impression that I disdain the city. That was certainly the tone of the review in the National Post. Consolation is a book that’s written out of both love and anger—it’s not a book that was intended to slap Toronto in the face. One of the characters asks another character in the book, “Are you awake?” and I think that part of the anger in the book comes out of feeling like the city is sleepwalking through its own history, and even through the present.