Linden MacIntyre explores the troubled depths of war
In The Only Café, author draws heavily on his journalism experience to write about Lebanon
In the course of his transition from journalist to novelist, Linden McIntyre has honed a style that draws heavily on his training as a reporter and producer of investigative documentaries. That style — spare, propulsive and rich in observational detail and dialogue — is well suited for the ambitious themes explored in his novels.
In The Only Café, MacIntyre returns to the theme that underpins his best writing: the corrupting influence of institutions and ideologies on the individual conscience. The individual in this case is Pierre Cormier, a Toronto corporate lawyer who dies in a mysterious explosion on his boat in a remote Cape Breton harbour.
As the novel opens, Cormier has finally been declared dead, five years after the 2007 accident (a fisherman discovered a fragment of Cormier’s bone and item of jewelry in a lobster trap). Cormier’s family gather to hear the reading of his will, which contains a strange request: in lieu of a funeral or memorial, Cormier’s friends, colleagues and family are asked to honour his memory with a comedic roast, to be held at the Only Café, a bar and coffee shop on Danforth Ave. in Toronto.
The family — Cormier’s wife Lois, ex-wife Aggie and adult son Cyril — are mystified by the request. Not only is the idea of a roast utterly out of character for the deceased lawyer, but Lois has no idea that he frequented the bohemian watering hole. There is also a name on the list — Ari, no last name included — that no one has heard of.
Cormier, the reader soon learns, is a man of many contradictions, secrets and disguises, beginning with his original family name, Haddad, which he changed upon arrival in Canada as a refugee from Lebanon in the mid 1980s.
Cyril, anxious to bring some type of closure to his relationship with a secretive, emotionally distant father, decides to honour Cormier’s request by setting up the roast, a vow that takes him to the Only Café.
There, he eventually meets Ari, a mysterious ex-intelligence agent and soldier formerly with the Israeli forces.
Ari is the most vivid of the novel’s many characters, a charismatic, breezily philosophical bar stool prophet whose confidentiality and witticisms mask a violent past. Through a series of flashbacks and multiple narrative viewpoints, MacIntyre gradually fills in the horrific historical secrets that brought Cormier and Ari together by chance in the bar.
Both men, it turns out, were involved in the infamous civilian massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, Cormier as a soldier with a Christian militia, Ari as a shadowy figure in the Israeli forces who allowed the massacres to happen. As Cyril gets closer to the mystery of his father’s past, he also begins to suspect that Cormier’s death may be linked to the massacres.
MacIntyre’s journalism training and experience (he reported on the massacres for the CBC) allow him to explore Lebanon’s labyrinthine, multi-factional civil war with authority and compassion. The sections that follow Cormier’s devolution from naive 16-year-old fisherman’s son to an orphaned, sociopathic soldier are masterful, placing readers in the midst of a complex conflict without burdening them with obvious research and historical précis.
Even better are the scenes between Ari and Cormier as they verbally spar at the Only Café. Cormier is convinced that he and Ari met in Beirut at the time of the massacres, though Ari’s alibi, that he was in Israel attending his mother’s funeral on those days, seems air tight.
The sections dedicated to Cyril’s investigation into his father’s past are less compelling. The main problem is Cyril himself, who functions too often as a narrative device to further the novel’s investigation into Cormier’s past. It doesn’t help that Cyril, an intern at the CBC, just happens to be working on a story on the radicalization of young Muslim Canadians during the Arab Spring, a convergence of themes and issues that feels too convenient to the novel’s aims.
Cyril is also not quite believable as a man in his early 20s. He doesn’t seem to have ever played a video game, used Facebook or watched porn, and he uses his cellphone the way Baby Boomers do: to make calls and send the occasional text. Certainly there are young men who fit that description, but Cyril’s preternatural maturity seems at times to exist as a means of furthering the plot.
The Only Café is strongest when it wades deeply into the troubled depths of war, fanaticism and the cynical manipulation of grief and idealism by the power hungry. The relatively still waters of contemporary Toronto pale in comparison.