Rough-hewn Canuck classic

Arguably the greatest Canadian novel, at the time of its re-publication in its restored form in 1968. Cabbagetown is read all over the world. It is a marvellous book.

Note the opening sentence (at left). This is the style of a hard-working writer who puts it all up front. Here's the story. Now read it.

He's not above telling the reader what's happened. He's not above explaining what's going on in a character's mind. He stoops to clichéd expressions when they fit. His writing is full of rough edges that finer writers would have smoothed away.

But few of those finer writers could deliver the gritty characters Garner does. Or the realistic setting. Or the story of the impoverished lives intertwining in Depression-era Toronto. Garner is seldom sentimental — as his main character Ken Trilling notes, "nobody should get eulogistic over a slum" — but he makes us care about his realistic, hard-bitten, but still dreaming, characters. We get caught up in their schemes and agonize over their conflicts.

They try various ways to escape their lowly fates, often by means that skirt or break the laws of the land. Trilling, an obvious stand-in for the author, eventually makes his way to Spain to fight for the republican cause under the Communist-led Brigades. His journey has led Cabbagetown's Trilling to be compared with The Grapes of Wrath's Tom Joad. 

The novel's not nearly that good. But it's pretty good. And some parts are brilliant. The last few paragraphs I find especially well written and moving. 

But the image that stays with you is that of the Cabbagetown from which Trilling escaped. It's a place of great sadness and resignation, but also of humanity that loves and laughs and cries, and dreams of a better future.

As a postscript, let me note that the Cabbagetown of which Garner wrote was later bulldozed and replaced with the Regent Park housing development (a more up-to-date kind of slum). The Toronto area now known as "Old Cabbagetown" is just north of the Cabbagetown of the novel and has long been gentrified into a fashionable, middle-class community. I actually lived there for two years as a student when the spreading yuppies and the remaining working-class residents were sharing streets, before the former took over completely.

— Eric

© Copyright 2002-2003 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.