|
This
spring, Timothy Taylor returns to the spotlight with the publication
of his debut novel. Stanley Park is a powerful and gripping tale
of food, family and the mysteries of the city. Jeremy Papier is
a young chef dedicated to creating a unique British Columbia cuisine
by celebrating locally grown ingredients in the food he creates.
Yet trying to stay true to his culinary creed is a struggle, and
the mounting debts for his restaurant, The Monkey’s Paw Bistro,
prove it. To complicate matters, Jeremy is becoming more and more
troubled by his strained relationship with his father, an anthropologist
engaged in an unorthodox field of study. As Jeremy struggles to
save his restaurant, he embarks upon an extraordinary adventure
that involves unusual (and illegal) financial schemes, the homeless
of Stanley Park, a decades-old unsolved murder case, a smooth-talking
business man with questionable motives, and the careful preparations
for an urban feast that readers will never forget.
Q. A journalist recently described you as “an overnight
success after a decade of hard work.” How great a challenge
has it been to get to this stage in your writing career?
A. It was hard work, sure. I think the challenge was two-fold.
First, I started quite late. I came out of MBA school, did four
years in banking, then ran my own Pacific fisheries consulting
practice for about seven years. I wrote a little during this time
but I didn’t really get serious until five years ago. As
a result, I never built a community of other writers around me.
I was writing on instinct, without any reliable way of estimating
my own chance of success. This was kind of scary on occasion.
I guess the second challenge lay in the simple fact that it’s
difficult to have serious writing ambitions and run your own business
at the same time. Both pursuits deserve your full attention, but
writing won’t return a living wage at the beginning, so there
are some hard realities. It doesn’t help that the two communities,
artists and merchant/professionals, are frequently suspicious
of and critical of one another. To be frank, when it inevitably
came out that I was also a writer, the news was not always well
received by my professional colleagues. And there was some distrust
going the other way too.
Despite all of this, I stress that I could not have begun any
other way. I needed exposure to people in different fields with
problems and issues and objectives outside the world of writing.
If I had tried to start a novel in my mid-20s after studying creative
writing, I can’t imagine what I would have written about.
I admire people who succeed this way and, recently, I’ve
met quite a few.
Q. Through the character of Jeremy Papier, the young chef at
the centre of Stanley Park, you offer readers a fascinating inside
look at the food world. Where did your knowledge of the food community
come from?
A. Researching the community of commercial cooks, I read a
lot. I also talked to a number of chefs and visited a kitchen
in action. Together, this added up to quite a bit of colourful
and useful stuff. Everything from professional tricks and techniques
to how cooks move in a kitchen and talk to each other. As far
as coming to understand the community of diners, the research
was a little more subjective. Every time I went to a restaurant,
I tried to get a feel for the kind of person that liked the place.
And after you read enough restaurant reviews, likewise, you start
to pick up on what the so-called trends are. So it was kind of
an agglomeration of research techniques through which I tried
to come to some practical knowledge of how things worked in commercial
kitchens and, at the same time, develop my own opinions about
culinary fashion.
Q. Vancouver’s homeless play an important role in the
novel. The men and women who flow into Stanley Park after dark
create a unique community for themselves, an almost netherworld
within the city. You give the characters that inhabit this world,
like Caruzo and Chladek, great dignity. In creating such a powerful
portrait, did you feel a sense of responsibility in writing about
the plight of the homeless?
A. There is a risk in writing about homelessness in anything
other than a realistic way, because you don’t want to diminish
the misery of it. On some fundamental level, living out-of-doors
is about getting rained on and about being cold and about eating
food that you find in dumpsters. There is nothing romantic about
it. Also, much of what we see on the streets is the product of
untreated mental illness and drug addiction. So, in answer to
the question, I feel tremendous responsibility primarily not to
abuse the reality of the situation.
That said, the misery of homelessness doesn’t imply a lack
of humanity or individuality or personal story. When I wrote about
characters like Caruzo and Chladek, I was trying to avoid the
idea that they could only be legitimate people if they were somehow
rescued from their homelessness. They are who they are, and they
bring their histories to where they are just as everybody else
does, in some tangled mix of fluke and predetermination.
Q. Over the years, the character called the Professor has become
obsessed with one of Stanley Park’s great mysteries: the
true-life murder case known as “The Babes in the Wood.”
Can you offer some background about the case and how you became
interested in it?
A. The skeletons of two little kids were discovered in Stanley
Park by groundskeepers in 1953. Forensics dated the murder to
the fall of 1947, when the kids would have been about five or
six. When the story was made public, a young woman came forward
who had been in the park in October of 1947 and had seen a woman
with a little boy and girl of about that age enter the forest,
then emerge later without the kids. It sounded like a solid lead
and the police solicited information from anyone who knew about
a little boy and girl having gone missing. Thousands of tips came
in, including, bizarrely, one from Clifford Olson’s mother
(Olson would have been a child himself at that time). In any case,
none of the tips came to anything and years later, in the mid-90s,
DNA evidence revealed that the two murdered children were in fact
brothers. I have since been told that the original testimony of
the young woman has been discounted as a result, although you
have to wonder if a five-year-old boy might not have easily been
mistaken for a girl, especially at a distance.
I don’t remember exactly when I first heard about the case,
but I can tell you that I read the story at some point, probably
when I was a kid, and that it drilled into my subconscious and
lodged there. I know this because when I began to develop my ideas
for the park side of this novel, from the beginning I had this
sense that Stanley Park was twinned with an old unsolved murder
of two children. And I thought I was making it up. Of course,
as I began to read about park history, the true story emerged.
It gave me chills when I first realized I had been “imagining”
something that really took place.
It’s noteworthy that the unsolved-crime people with the Vancouver
Police Department still take the case very seriously. True story:
I heard from a misinformed source that there had been a Babes
in the Wood deathbed confession somewhere. I searched everywhere
and could not confirm this. Finally, I posted a note on an Internet
bulletin board concerning itself with BC events and history. I
had no responses. Weeks later, I was in the Vancouver Police Museum
and I was chatting with the curator. I asked him if he’d
heard anything about the confession and he became very, very interested.
No, he said, he hadn’t, but he’d heard that someone
had posted this rumour on an Internet bulletin board. He was very
keen to know if there was anything to this. So, they were paying
attention.
|