Mindscapes of Montréal: Québec’s Urban Novel, 1960–2005 by Ceri Morgan (review)

Ceri Morgan’s fascinating narrative successfully achieves the difficult feat of linking concise historical, political, and socio-economic information on Quebec and its major city Montreal with sustained reflection on concomitant changes in the city’s cultural environment and their reflection and refraction in contemporaneous fictional production. Her six chapters follow a flexible and roughly chronological pattern traversing decade by decade a variety of key locations and neighbourhoods: the ‘Manichean’ bilingual city (West End anglophone, East End francophone) of the Quiet Revolution and the nationalist 1960s; the francophone working-class suburbs of Longueil and Rivière des Prairies, birthplaces of the October Crisis of 1970; the depoliticized, individualistic climate of downtown, in the wake of the 1980 referendum defeat and the ‘spectacular’ affirmation of diverse sexual identities manifest in the red-light district of Saint Catherine Street East; the pluricultural turn of the 1980s and the surge of immigrant writing around Côte des Neiges and Mile End; the disaffected, bof, post-baby-boomer generation of the globalized ‘world city’ of the 1990s; and, finally, the fragmented microspaces of the urban loner, apartment, café, or park (early 2000s). Each chapter comprises a résumé of salient political and socio-economic events, a thumbnail of contemporary fictional writing, and more detailed summary and analysis of three representative novels. The eighteen authors and works provide an interesting mix of the familiar and the less well known. Thus Jacques Ferron, Michel Tremblay, and Francine Noël stand alongside Josée Yvon, Christian Mistral, and Danielle Roger; and Nicole Brossard’s French Kiss and Dany Laferrière’s Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer alongside André Major’s Le Cabochon and Louis Hamelin’s La Rage. Although there have been other studies of Quebec’s modern novel, Morgan’s book is unique as an up-to-date description and analysis in English of this major genre. Her chosen approach as a cultural and literary geographer works well, both for an anglophone readership, whose acquaintance with the province and with Montreal-based fiction may be patchy or non-existent, and for a more knowledgeable audience, who will enjoy revisiting the familiar and discovering the unfamiliar through the lens of the author’s original mix of critical insight and imaginative empathy (the book is enhanced by short snatches of Morgan’s own creative writing). Indeed, both groups would probably have appreciated an even fuller examination of the different mindscapes so engagingly highlighted in her panoramic survey. One disappointment, determined no doubt by publishing constraints, is the shortness of the main text (only 140 pages) — the tip of a very substantial iceberg of research, attested by nearly fifty pages of footnotes and some thirty pages of bibliography. Another is the absence of any complementary visual illustration (beyond the attractive cover photograph and a skimpy map (p. xiv) of central and greater Montreal). The final straw is the extortionate price (currently £90), a deterrent to potential purchasers and readers for whom the book would be a most informative and thought-provoking guide on their flâneries through the cultural and literary heart of French North America.