Her 'doppelganger problems' have to do with reports she receives about a startling lookalike who has been seen in the Kensington Market area near her bookstore each sighting comes with a touch (or more) of violence either in her bookstore or in the Market area. ' Jean recounts her personal experiences in the first person at first they appear fairly ordinary and orderly, if a bit tangy. We begin with 42 year-old Jean Mason, a mother of two and a bookstore owner who in her opening sentence admits that 'My doppelganger problems began one afternoon in early April. Whitman's words apply, I think, to life as a whole-life being the greatest mystery any of us can know-but here, in what is a fascinating piece of personal writing, Redhill declares that he stands by his sense of the mystery of the individual even under untoward conditions. He knows how to tap into the city's dramatic possibilities.īellevue Square is a highly literary novel that confronts the reader with not only a challenging psychological mystery but also what Redhill calls a 'modern ghost story.' For the novel's epigraph he chose an appropriate line from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself - I and this mystery here we stand. Initially, what most attracted me to them and to Bellevue Square was his ability to employ Toronto as a rich literary setting. I had liked Redhill's earlier novels, Martin Sloane (2001) and Consolation (2006). Perhaps it is a given that contemporary novels about doppelgangers (doubles) and advanced kinds of mental illness are by their very nature overly difficult-maybe even evasive-in what they can actually say.

Bellevue Square is a fascinating but challenging read I confess that in its final third I began to find that Michael Redhill's literary gamesmanship and medically induced plotting conspired to make the narrative top-heavy with implications and, finally, more frustrating than satisfying.

I would be lying if I claimed to understand it fully. I finished reading this stunning novel several months ago, well before it won The Giller Prize in November 2017.

Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill