The Truth Teller - Couverture souple

HEROES IN OUR PAST

"Ladies and gentlemen. We have inherited a vision.”

Dr. Laird’s voice resounded like the clapper of a bell, like the first chords of a hymn. Hearts rose to its beat. Backs straightened, chins lifted. Everyone knew what was to come. He always began that way. And his audience always sat on folding chairs, no less rapt for the discomfort or the repetition, which was anticipated, and annual. It was a glorious fall day. When was it not a glorious day for the Manor’s commencement exercises?

October was perhaps a strange time for a commencement. School had been over for months; results were in; these students seated on stage were already history, off at universities across the country. But Commencement had always been on the third of October. To “commence” was not only to graduate, but to begin, and all beginnings at the Manor led back to the day Dr. Dugald Laird met Miss Francesca Morrow, his wife, Vice-Principal and Headmistress. Fifty years ago today fate caused their paths to cross right here on Taddle Creek Drive; they fell both in love and into eudaimonía, the state of being happy following their demons, in running the Manor School for Classical Studies in an unsuspecting Toronto.

As if to catch the glory, the giant Norway maple dominating the terraced lawn had leaves of gold worthy of Byzantium. So thought Amelia, general factotum of the school, seated in the second row. Weeks ago, its big, waxy, five-point paws had begun to dazzle and twist in the light winds of early autumn; now one by one the thin red stems snapped from the branches, each leaf taking a zigzag, fitful journey to the ground. The palm-sized gilt was piled up around the tree’s enormous base. Gold above, gold below: it was as if, somewhere between sky and ground, there was the still, mirroring surface of an invisible lake.

Yes, as Amelia knew, a glimmer of prehistoric water did lie at the foot of the lawn, for the Manor sat atop the Escarpment, that ragged, ten-metre cliff marking the shore of the once-great Lake Iroquois. Many millennia ago the lake shrank southward leaving the sloping flatlands, which had been its bottom, traversed with lush, deep ravines and shallow creeks. The natives grew rice on the shore, and dried their fish. When the British sailed up they decided to build a fort at the mouth of a creek, the one with a bend in its path. This creek came by the name of Taddle, some say, from the Tattle family, which homesteaded nearby. Others claim the name referred to the tadpoles inhabiting the water, still others that the name was an imitation of the sound of water running over rocks. Or it could have been a variant of “tattle,” a reference to the gossip exchanged on its banks.

No matter: at its mouth were the beginnings of a great city.

The sloping expanse between water and high ground began to fill with farms and wagons, with people and taverns. Amelia liked to picture it: the fields first ploughed and then paved; two hundred years passing until the people numbered two million, two and a half, plying trades from stock-trading to carpet-cleaning; the space clogged with factories, homes, a gothic pink-stone parliament, a glassed-in shopping mall and a streaming network of roads to carry those people back and forth. There were bank towers forty storeys high and ugly parking lots, but still there could be found gardens chock with roses and, in the deep ravines, vestiges of wilderness, foxes and even coyote. The city spread uphill unchecked, and along the banks of Taddle Creek were hospitals and museums and a university. The Taddle was buried as the clutter of untidy streets climbed to the escarpment, that old lake’s lip. But there, here, thought Amelia, above the cliff, at the headwaters of the creek, the city stopped. Was forced by both landscape and human foresight to turn aside. That seemingly unstoppable growth made a detour, leaving untouched this quiet enclave with its circle of homes, its huge old trees and its atmosphere of genteel withdrawal. Within that circle the Manor was the prettiest house, its stuccoed walls overgrown with creepers, its dormers snug with casement windows and the sloping roof rising in two levels to flow elegantly into the contours of the hill.

Proud that the onrush of time might be slowed for even a breath, Amelia straightened her spine. Under the metallic slant of the October sun, students and parents listened with hands folded. Copies of Renaissance paintings flapped in the light breeze on the divider where they were displayed. Skirted martial artists with medieval bows bobbed on their toes on the side stairs, warming their tendons. Miranda and Prospero yawned and rolled their necks to prepare for their scene. And the old man waxed on. It hardly mattered what he said. He had said it last year and the year before and he would say it again next year. Though rapt, his audience was not listening to his words. It was listening instead to his heart; it was basking in his fervour, magnified as usual by the reverence of his wife, who gazed steadily at her husband, a small smile playing on her lips.

Katherine Govier was immersed in writing a magazine article for Toronto Life about violent girl gangs when she realized she wanted to use the material in a novel. Having two teenaged children at home allowed her to eavesdrop as she researched the characters for her novel. One character in particular intrigued her: Cassandra, the truth teller.

In The Truth Teller, the Manor School for Classical Studies is an exclusive private institution in a leafy enclave of Toronto, dedicated to redeeming the wayward children of the well-to-do. For generations, Headmaster Dugald Laird and his wife, Francesca Morrow, united by romance and a common purpose, have laboured to fill their students' hearts and minds with the ideals of truth and beauty. Now, increasingly, the classes only divide the students' time between cigarette breaks, graffiti wars and drug deals; the teenagers have "headphones clamped to their ears and rings pierced into their crotches," and a habit of carving their own flesh. Enter the new girl, Cassie. Overweight, unfashionable and nervous, she also has an annoying habit of blurting out uncomfortable truths. Offering assistance during a savage street fight, she is recruited into the rebel girl gang known as the Dead Ladies.

Meanwhile, cracks are beginning to show in the perfect marriage shared by Dugald and Francesca. Dugald is haunted by memories. As if waking from a dream, he realizes that, immersed in his love for ideals, the classics, and Francesca, he has left behind what now seems so real – the family he spurned fifty years ago. For her part, Francesca is convinced Dugald's spirit will be revived during the school’s annual pilgrimage to the ancient ruins of Delphi. Under the hot Greek sun, however, the fabric of illusion will be burned away.

The Truth Teller, Govier's sixth novel, became a national bestseller. Reviewers describe her as a novelist at the height of her powers, whose skill and imagination were in full force as she fashioned a complex story around deeply drawn, memorable characters. With characteristic energy, wit and insight she explores today's urban life, revealing the intimate moments that shape our lives and define our times. The novel is tinged by a subtle apocalyptic vision, revealed through the "junk world" of the teenagers, and set against the beauty of a culture two thousand years old.

The novel is also richly coloured by Govier's travels in Greece and by allusions to classical literature. In ancient Greece, Cassandra was the young priestess of Apollo who foresaw Troy’s doom; Apollo's curse left Cassandra able to see the future but never to be believed by those she tried to warn. Govier casts her, in this contemporary tale, as a rebel girl, modelled on city squeegee kids with "turquoise hair and tattoos." Cassie carries the weight of her ancient past, reminding us, as Gary Draper noted in Books in Canada, that Govier's stories often work simultaneously as naturalistic fiction and as fables.