In The Skin Of A Lion by Michael Ondaatje

Patrick Lewis is an eastern Ontario boy, raised by his taciturn father to lots of hard work of the authentic Ontario variety: retrieving cows from icy lakes and loosening river log jams with dynamite blasts. All grown up and working in Toronto of the 1920s Patrick falls in love with two very different women who happen to be good friends. Every character in the book contains a grain of the surreal, while being rooted in Ontario circumstances. Carravaggio is a thief who first met his wife Angelica while hiding out in a mushroom shed. Nicholas is a Macedonian bridge builder, who makes the Bloor Street Viaduct possible by swinging in air across the Don Valley. Patrick works as Searcher and in a slaughterhouse before he puts his skills with dynamite to work on public structures. I won't tell you about the girls because I don't want to give it all away. In general, this book shows a young Toronto, a young Ontario, teeming with hard-labouring immigrants - the Canadian Dream and all that. Patirck wanders through it all, at first distant and removed:

"Clara and Ambrose and Alice and Temelcoff and Cato--this cluster made up a drama without him. and he himself was nothing but a prism that refracted their lives. He searched out things, he collected things. He was an abashed man, an inheritance from his father. Born in Abashed, Ontario."

But gradually Patrick absorbs his life into himself, which brings all kinds of good things and, of course, pain. Its a good story that anchors its fairytale qualities with all kinds of historical data-- data which holds its own surreal beauty (am I beginning to see a pattern here?).

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