Take a walk around the Toronto of Consolation - winner of the 2007 Toronto Book Award.

Click here to download the podcast to your computer (Duration: 1:01:14 - File size: 57MB - to save right click and save link as)
Click on the audio link to listen to the tour.
To download the companion map (PDF), please click here.

Heritage Toronto has worked with Michael Redhill to produce a podcast walking tour based on his award-winning novel - Consolation. This podcast has been produced in partnership with the Toronto Public Library and the CBC and is now available for download.

Consolation was the Toronto Public Library's choice for the "One Book" that all Torontonians are encouraged to read during February - Keep Toronto Reading month. Consolation won the Toronto Book award last year, given to "books of literary or artistic merit that are evocative of Toronto". Evocative, indeed, Consolation is a multi-layered telling of Toronto's story which moves the reader on many levels.

Heritage Toronto has worked with Michael to create a walking tour which will take you back to the Toronto of 1856 - as experienced by Consolation's Jem Hallam - and forward to 1997 and the streets of modern Toronto. You will follow in Hallam's footsteps, while listening to Michael read passages from the book and connect them to visited sites along the way. Michael is a passionate advocate of preservation, and in the following excerpt from the tour he tells us in his own words what inspired him to write the book, and why he feels that it is so important to protect and preserve Toronto's past.

"Consolation emerged from my fascination with this city's desire and ability to renew itself, but also with its sometimes infuriating disregard for its own history. It has seemed to me, through the forty years of my life I have lived in Toronto, that it is a city too often motivated by the needs of the immediate present. And yet, this is not the spirit the original builders of this city imbued it with. They were building a city for people to live in, not just for the people of their time, but for those who would one day call it home. They were passing something on. It's not their fault that those who inherited the city tore down so much of their work in the name of progress, in the desire to keep up with what they perceived to be the charms of other cities. Fashion is good, but you can hang a pair of lime green corduroy pants back in your closet until the fashion returns, if it ever does. You can't do that with the changes that are made to your streets and parks and buildings in the name of money and prestige. The choices you make in a city last a long time. The idea of what lies beneath this city moves and motivates me - the places we have buried and lost, the memories shoved aside, and the ghost that remains. The character of David Hollis, the twentieth century geographer who lived in both the past and the present, emerged from my sense that in a truly great city, the two must somehow live together. In cities all over the world, they do. Roman ruins live beside twentieth century buildings; nineteenth century palaces next to busy modern thoroughfares. For whatever reason, here in Toronto, we have spent a century living in a contingent place, a place always on its way to becoming something else. And yet, there is a Toronto already here, one that can speak to us of who we are, who we were, and why we call this city our home. If we could learn to live in harmony with that Toronto, the citizens of this city might begin to want to protect it, and to continue to build their city in a spirit of honouring all of its citizens, past and present. Only then will Torontonians feel they are a part of a story that they are telling for their own sakes. Until then, the attitude that will reign here is the one embodied in a short passage from Consolation "I don't know why heritage is such a hard sell here," said [the reporter]. "It just is." [Marianne turned to him] "You know what David said...No one wants to hear the story of a whore's childhood".