Linden MacIntyre’s The Only Café
-Frank Macdonald
Earlier this autumn, being interviewed at the Cabot Trail Writers Festival, novelist Linden MacIntyre spoke about our familiarity with ‘survivor guilty,’ a condition in which people punish themselves for having survived an event others did not. What we hear about much less, the author explained, is survivor shame, what people in desperate circumstances are capable of carrying out simply to survive.
The reluctance of these survivors to speak about what their survival required of them may account for why people, soldiers for example, avoid talking about a war in which they have been part. That refusal, or inability, to talk about a central event in one’s life, makes it difficult to communicate with others, particularly family.
At its core Linden MacIntyre’s new novel, The Only Café, is the story of a son, Cyril Cormier, trying to understand the lifelong disconnect between himself and his father, Pierre. It is an effort to understand that brings the young reporter through the past as it has been cryptically recorded in his father’s journals, as well as through the present as a CBC reporter trying to grasp the themes and tragedies of the current world disorder, and the coincidental or conspicuous links between then and now.
Pierre Cormier, a Lebanese Christian, was a teenager during the civil war that tore Lebanon apart between 1972 - 90, a civil war marked by massacres and betrayals. It was a civil war that devoured childhoods as ruthlessly as it did adults, Pierre’s among them. While he was still a teenager, a priest from Cape Breton, visiting Lebanon to research his Lebanese family roots, befriends Pierre and helps the young man come to Cape Breton. Pierre is taken in by a local family, educated, becomes a successful lawyer, all the good things one hopes a refugee will experience in a new country.
Acting on behalf of the Canadian mining company he represents, Cormier is required to suppress the fact of the massacre of eight protesters demonstrating against the mining company’s way of doing business in Indonesia. He succeeds in keeping the event from becoming public. But the Indonesian massacre contained within it a single image on a piece of film that unearths another long buried image, an image that carries us deep into Pierre Cormier’s past.
Amid health issues, an estrangement from his son, the troubleshooting nature of his work, Pierre Cormier finds himself drawn to a small Toronto bar named The Only Café, where a cultural convergence of a mosque, neighbourhood Israelis, and the atmosphere and clientele of the café evoke the past for the lawyer.
In The Only Café Pierre strikes up a semi-friendship with Ali, an affable mystery of a man. Encounters, discussions, and questions raised inside The Only Café becomes the catalysts that drive MacIntyre’s story, examining the excesses and horrors of war that Pierre has experienced. It is in that café, as well, that his son, Cyril, gets glimmer of his father’s past.
Weaving its way through Pierre Cormier’s successful life in Canada as a corporate lawyer, and his earlier life in Lebanon, The Only Café is an unfolding mystery as Cyril searches for the truth of his father’s life, and the questionable truth surrounding his father’s death in a boat explosion far from Toronto or Lebanon, in a place called Mabou Coal Mines.
The layered and intriguing revelations of The Only Café draw their strength from MacIntyre’s 10-Emmy, 50-year career as a journalist and investigative reporter, his finely honed fictional storytelling, as well as his familiarity with his home island of Cape Breton.
In MacIntyre’s world, the real and the creative, there’s no reason why a hardrock miner from Cape Breton Island, or a community newspaper called The Inverness Oran, couldn’t be instrumental in exposing an international scandal, the coverup of the massacre of people protesting against a mine in Indonesia. (A vignette of Cyril Cormier ordering in a meal in a place called the Red Shoe is filled with smiles for those familiar with Mabou.)
Linden MacIntyre’s compelling novel travels through one of the more disturbing periods of the latter half of the last century. Yet the writer creates a very human cast, whatever their secrets and shadows, through whom he tells this story, a story that explores the awfulness of man’s inhumanity to man while, amid the suspicion and distrust, violence, and explosions, scraps of warmth and humour poke through like shiny fragments of shrapnel.
The Only Café is a novel that doesn’t attempt to answer all the questions it raises, but does satisfy a reader’s desire to be told a good story. As in his previous novels, MacIntyre demonstrates his mastery at that.
The Only Café is available at the Bear Paw Gift Shop in Inverness.
