In the Skin of a Lion

Patrick Lewis grows up a searcher in rural Ontario, watching his father dynamite logjams, before moving to Toronto and falling in with the immigrant laborers, Finnish, Macedonian, Italian, who are physically building the city's infrastructure, the Bloor Street Viaduct, the R.C. Harris Water Filtration Plant, work the official record credits to engineers and commissioners rather than to the men risking their lives on the scaffolding and in the tunnels. Ondaatje's title comes from Gilgamesh's lament over Enkidu, and he uses the epic's oldest surviving grief to argue that Toronto's own unrecorded builders deserve the same scale of mourning history gives kings.

Nicholas Temelcoff, who works the bridge construction in near-total darkness on a system of ropes and pulleys, saves a falling nun mid-plummet in the novel's most famous set piece, and that nun, having lost her habit and her name in the fall, remakes herself as the actress and radical Alice Gull, the woman Patrick eventually loves. Ondaatje builds the novel out of these unrecorded acts of transformation, workers whose skill and courage never make the newspaper, women who invent new selves out of accidents nobody official was watching, and treats them as more truthful history than anything the city's archives kept.

Commissioner Harris commissions a filtration plant so ornate it resembles a cathedral, insisting on marble and tile far beyond what function requires, a monument he intends purely to his own vision of the city's future. Ondaatje sets Patrick's late, near-catastrophic attempt to sabotage that plant against its own unacknowledged construction history, since the building Harris will be remembered for is standing on labor Harris never once had to name.

Ondaatje tells Patrick's life out of order and in isolated, image-heavy scenes rather than continuous narrative, a structure that mimics the actual working method of the bridge and tunnel crews it describes, separate crews laboring on separate spans that only cohere into a single structure once enough of the pieces are in place. The novel asks its reader to do the same unglamorous assembly work the immigrant laborers did, trusting that scattered fragments of loss and labor will eventually meet in the middle.