Michael Ondaatje's Toronto

Michael Ondaatje was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1943 and arrived in Canada in 1962 in his late teens, later settling into a long teaching career at York University's Glendon College and living for decades in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood. In 2000 he helped found the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Toronto-based award that became one of the most prominent poetry prizes in the English-speaking world. But his most lasting contribution to how Torontonians see their own city is a novel: In the Skin of a Lion, published in 1987.

A novel about infrastructure

Set largely in Toronto during the 1920s and 1930s, the novel follows a migrant labourer into the immigrant work camps that physically built the city, anchored by two real structures: the Bloor Viaduct, completed in 1918, and the R.C. Harris Water Filtration Plant on the eastern waterfront, an Art Deco facility nicknamed the "Palace of Purification." Ondaatje uses their construction to tell a story the official civic record largely left out — the Macedonian, Finnish and Italian labourers whose work built Toronto's bridges and waterworks with their names attached to none of it. The novel is now widely taught in Ontario schools and is regularly cited as one of the essential Toronto novels.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Michael Ondaatje
• Wikipedia — In the Skin of a Lion