Canadian Living Books

Bellevue Square tells the story of Jean who becomes obsessed with her own doppelganger

Nov 10, 2017

By: Sara Cation

Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill

Canadian Living Books

Bellevue Square tells the story of Jean who becomes obsessed with her own doppelganger

Nov 10, 2017

By: Sara Cation

Jean trades her quiet bookstore life for one of intrigue and mystery as she tries to learn more about the woman who looks exactly like her.

On a quiet day in her Toronto bookstore, Jean Mason has the shock of a lifetime: One of her regulars strolls in claiming to have seen her—elsewhere and with shorter hair—just moments before. No, she doesn’t have a twin sister. But several people swear to have spotted one—or, rather, a doppelganger. Is she an apparition?A sinister spirit? Or simply a real person of striking similarity?

Jean starts to investigate, trading slow days in the bookstore for long hours in the nearby Bellevue Square park where she enlists a motley crew of park regulars—including a drug addict and a patient from the nearby Centre for Addiction and Mental Health—to alert her of any sightings. Months pass, and Jean learns her doppelganger is much more than a mirror image: She has her own family, her own wardrobe (though some of her jewellery is shockingly similar to Jean’s custom pieces), her own name and her own life centred in and around Kensington Market.

But the informants are disappearing, even turning up dead, and Jean starts to fear she’s in danger. As her imagination spins out of control, her grip on reality dissolves and everything she—and the reader—understands is called into question.

Dizzyingly spellbinding, powerfully gripping and utterly absorbing, this book blurs reality in such a transfixing way that every now and then while reading, I had to look around to ground myself again in the real Toronto. I wish I could start this book all over again (without knowing the outcome, of course) but am absolutely thrilled that this is the first installment in a triptych of loosely related fictions by author Michael Redhill. I hope the next is just as haunting and hypnotizing.

Q&A WITH AUTHOR MICHAEL REDHILL

Q: What is the one thing you hope readers walk away with after reading your novel?

A: I hope they walk away with a slightly altered sense of the places that are familiar to them and the things they take for granted about their own existence.

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Michael Redhill, author of Bellevue Square

Q: How does the setting influence the narrative?

A: The setting of Bellevue Square is very important to the novel as it's a bit of a crossroads in Toronto where all different kinds of people from all different walks of life meet. It's in the heart of the city, but it's also very close to the Centre for Mental Health and it's been a touchstone area in Toronto for 150 years.

Q: How do your own personal experiences come through in the book?

A: I would say that my experiences as a person that uses the city. I walk a lot in Toronto, and so the quality if just observing what's around me, it's laid in pretty deep. The personal aspect has to do with the fact that I can see myself in the city, I've been in it for so many years, living in it, thinking about it, writing about it.

Q: What is your favourite Canadian book?

A: Michael Ondaatje is somebody I started reading in my teens and it really affected me. Coming Through Slaughter was the first book, the first novel that wasn't a novel. It was something hydridized. And I think we've been doing that in Canada is a way since the 1960s with our presses and our experimental writing. That was very much a source of inspiration for me.

Bellevue Square (Doubleday Canada) by Michael Redhill, $32, amazon.ca.

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