Random House Canada, August 8, 2017.
Four Stars
Cyril Cormier grew up in Toronto with a Lebanese
refugee father and a mother from Cape Breton. They divorced when Cyril was
young, and he didn’t see much of his father Pierre, who was a successful
corporate lawyer with a new, younger wife and infant son. During an
international scandal at the mining company where he worked, Pierre went
missing under suspicious circumstances – there was an explosion on the boat he
was living on, and his body was never found.
Five years after Pierre disappeared, one of his bones
is found and he is finally declared dead. When the will is read, Cyril and the
rest of the family discover that Pierre included an unusual request – instead
of a traditional funeral, he asked for a “roast” to take place at a bar in
Toronto’s east end called The Only Café. There is also a mysterious name on the
guest list, “Ari”, that none of the family had ever heard Pierre mention.
At the time his father is declared dead, Cyril is
interning at a national newsroom (likely modelled after the CBC) that is
working on a documentary about homegrown terrorism. When Cyril’s Lebanese
background is discovered by his bosses, they ask him to bring a personal
perspective to the war on terror. Cyril decides to investigate the events that
led to his father’s death, and the first step is meeting with the mysterious
Ari. Cyril discovers that Ari was an Israeli soldier who met Pierre in Lebanon
in the 1980s, during the Lebanese civil war.
Cyril suspects that Ari can answer questions not only
about Pierre’s past but also about whether his father is truly dead. Soon Cyril’s
personal investigation intersects with the larger story of terrorism at the
newsroom, and there are surprising connections to his friends and colleagues.
The deception stretches from the present day back to the Lebanese massacres of
September 1982, and the plot is grounded in these historical events, bringing
the current political climate in the Middle East into sharp focus.
The Only Café is a slow-paced mystery with both historical and contemporary
relevance. It demonstrates how history is constantly repeating – with different
forms of terrorism always in the background and bubbling up to the surface over
time – and it puts a personal spin on the stories we often hear from a
distance. There is plenty of dialogue to keep the story moving forward,
although there perhaps could have been more inner contemplation and character
development. There are constantly shifting perspectives, which were sometimes
confusing and overly complex – there are only so many health, family and work
dramas that one person can go through, and they really didn’t add that much to
the story. But despite my issues with the novel, the writing was powerful
enough to continually draw me back in to this complex and timely story of
family secrets and their effects on global events.
I received this book from Random House Canada and
NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
No comments:
Post a Comment