![]() You couldn’t say they’re on the outside looking in since the inside-mainstream white society-is barely referred to or glimpsed except, perhaps, in the cops, “cold-eyed with purpose,” who, after a spate of shootings, undertake regular, intimidating sweeps of the neighbourhood. The novel’s characters also exist, needless to say, on the periphery. The “dull purple” sky that hangs over the Park is “the wasted light of a city.” Here, the sun arrives as plate-scrapings. A city’s suburbs are by definition on its outskirts, but what we feel in the Scarborough of Brotheris the connotive dig of the prefix “sub”: lesser than, subordinate. That sense of a parallel, fringe-dwelling world stays with us throughout the novel. ![]() ![]() ![]() The complex itself, a concrete jungle home to working-class immigrants from around the globe, is known as “the Park” its local store, “Heritage Value” Convenience, is “run by that asshole who framed his useless foreign degree, despised the dark, stinking guts of every other immigrant.” In the violence-prone suburban Toronto housing complex that serves as the setting for David Chariandy’s Writers’ Trust Prize-winning novel, the clustered, grim towers and low-rises-with names like the Waldorf, the Oberlin, the Rosedale-stand as mocking facsimile of a distant, glamorous world. ![]()
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