The Only Café
The Only Café was quiet. He stood at the bar, ordered a beer, watched the door. He wasn't sure what brought him back. Perhaps the wall of memory, 1982, perhaps the suspicion that the fat stranger, Ari, might know something from behind that – so far – impenetrable wall. There was no sign of him.
A grey-haired man came into the store the other day, looking for a book on the Cold War-era Soviet Union; a particular book written by a man who had been his colleague back in the day at CSIS (the Canadian spy agency). After helping him locate that book, and having been intrigued by this man's apparent knowledge base, I leveled a mock-conspiratorial look at him and asked if he figured the world was becoming safer or scarier. Without missing a beat he replied, dead serious, “The world has never been scarier than it is right now. If you only knew.” Well, I guess I asked for that (but I was rather hoping a nostalgia for his [presumed] old cloak and dagger days would have prejudiced him in favour of an improving worldview: In my day we hid our phones in our shoes, not our pockets, and the bad guys didn't brag about their intentions on Facebook...). The Only Café, written by career journalist Linden MacIntyre, seems an effort to part the curtain a bit; to show that the things that seem scary to us today have been bubbling away for decades; the world is neither safer nor scarier, there's just a different lead story in the headlines. By trying to translate actual events into literature, I found the first half of this book to be unnecessarily obfuscatory, but by the end, I was glad I stuck with it: this book has some important things to say, and ultimately, it says them well.
This is the last time you're going to ask me a question like that. You know exactly what to do. Was that what Brawley said? Or were they words from another time, another place? Or do time and place make any difference to destiny?
The Only Café opens in 2012 with the reading of a will: After having been missing and presumed dead for five years, some remains of Pierre Cormier have been found; his estate can finally be settled. Cormier's young adult son, Cyril, is present – seeking closure – and when the lawyer mentions that his father had wanted a roast of sorts, to be held at the unheard of Only Café, Cyril decides to look into the place: maybe it's time for him to finally get to know the father who had left him and his mother so many years before. We soon learn that Cyril is interning at a network news agency (obviously the CBC, with superstar anchor “Lloyd Manville”), and by coincidence, he starts researching events that took place during his father's (never discussed) childhood in Lebanon. The story then shifts to Pierre's perspective in the months leading up to his disappearance, and when events in his present begin to remind him of things that happened during the Lebanese Civil War of the 1980s, Pierre experiences a muddling of memory that is so confusing to him that it's confusing to the reader as well (and I didn't understand why MacIntyre decided to layer on career difficulty, a health scare, a new marriage, and trying to have a baby: all of this extraneous experience added nothing to Pierre's core struggle between his past and present and just further muddied the point of it all).
The past is never dead as long as there is memory. Memory is the afterlife, both heaven and hell.
The narrative continues to switch between Cyril's present, Pierre's last days, and Pierre's Lebanese past, and what it reveals about historical events was an education for me: I had never heard of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, which MacIntyre apparently reported on as a journalist, and its inclusion here is gritty and realistic, and as an act of commemoration, feels vital and overdue.
In this line of work there's no distinction between what's historical and what's contemporary.
Because Cyril is learning to be a journalist – while attempting to track down clues about his father's past – the historical information that he discovers is added organically to the narrative. And because he is working with other journalists who are trying to dig up a story about the radicalisation of youth in Toronto mosques, there's a very natural line drawn between the events of the past and the present; the format works really well to show the bigger picture. It was especially apt to have so much discussed in the network meetings; to see how news is selected and shaped.
The only way to know what's happening is to be part of it.
The Only Café has the tension of a mystery – Just what happened to Pierre? How does Ari come into it? Will Cyril ever find the truth? Or is he putting himself in danger? – but some of the personal storylines drain the energy from this tension: In addition to Pierre's mounting personal troubles, I didn't see the point in Cyril's hesitant lovelife, or his friend Leo's frequent appearances, or Cyril's mother's limp depiction. It felt a bit deliberate to include a young Muslim, an aging Israeli, a retired Canadian Forces soldier, an RCMP officer: Yes, we get the whole picture, but I was aware of the artist's hand leading me to what he wanted me to see. I have enjoyed MacIntyre's books set in Cape Breton, so I did like that Pierre and then Cyril spent some time there, but as they don't improve the overall thesis, these parts felt like atmosphere for its own sake. I was amused to learn that the Only Café actually exists on the Danforth in Toronto, yet that leaves me confused as to why it's featured by name. Here's the bottom line: I did find much confusing (as I presume I was meant to), but I'm glad I finished this book. While it doesn't work perfectly for me as a novel, The Only Café has much to offer the reader and I suspect it will feature on the literary awards lists later in the year.
