My friend Ellen sent me this book. The initial appeal was that this book was about Stanley Park in Vancouver, BC, Canada -- a city I lived in for 25 years. The book is about a chef and his relationship with his father.

Great fiction from Vancouver author Tim Taylor. Read this book and you will want to be a cook and find how you connect to the world.

As a Vancouverite, I loved delving into a book where I could so easily connect with the places and culture that it portrayed. But I had mixed feelings about this novel. I gave it 3 stars as a median because one storyline was 4 stars and the other storyline was 2. The story of Chef Jeremy and his struggles with owning a small restaurant in downtown Vancouver, his decline into debt, but his determined pursuit of his vision of local food (and the wild interpretation of that in the ending) - was a great read. The other storyline, of the mystery of the buried children in Stanley Park, and the strange, drunken trips that Jeremy would go on in the park with his father and their homeless friends, ended up being incoherent and didn't add much to the story. It would whip between being a grounded, realistic novel to a verbal acid trip - which was rather hard to follow at times.

Rewinding the clock a little, I dove into Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park after having read his brilliant and compelling (and later) Blue Light Project. Written in 2001, but set a few years earlier, Stanley Park is much more grounded in reality – until it isn’t.

Set in post-Expo, pre-Olympics Vancouver – a time when I also lived in the city and was deeply involved in civic history projects – the novel circles around notions of rootedness. Following the string of connectedness back to whatever it’s tied to is financially-challenged Jeremy Papier, a red-hot up and coming chef with a string of maxed out credit cards and an unacknowledged crush on his culinary partner. Also following what turns out to be a not-so-different string is Jeremy’s grieving and estranged father, The Professor, a self-declared immersive-anthropologist ostensibly studying the homeless in Stanley Park, but perhaps closer to both home and homelessness than his son thinks.

For those unfamiliar with Vancouver, Stanley Park is the green heart of the city, less accessible and wilder than NYC’s Central Park, but alike in its stubbornness to be commoditized at the break-neck speed of the rest of one of North America’s most expensive cities. Established in 1888, it’s completely surrounded by water, except for a slender isthmus; it is connected to the city’s north shore by the spectacular (if crumbling) Lion’s Gate Bridge (if you were ever wondering where Lion’s Gate Films got its name from). The park is a piece of land worth a gazillion dollars and it’s actually pretty easy to get lost if you stray from the paths. The park, with its legends and its history, is profoundly “local”, a theme that comes up again and again in Tayor’s story of passion, regret, and – food.

Oh, yes, there’s food. Fellow foodies, keep in mind that this story is set well before the farm-to-table movement was in full swing. Jeremy’s devotion to what is seasonal and local – and not disguising it with painful fusion-for-fusion’s-sake acrobatics – was crisp at the time this novel is set, and possibly at the time it was written.

I savoured the ecstatic descriptions of walk-in freezers. Indulgent discussion of knife work, bordering on fetishism? Oh, yes, please. And rather like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (remember that movie?), the chef ends up with the last laugh, in ways that are better described than imbibed.

The “Babes in the Woods” story of Stanley Park is (mostly) true. What many people don’t know is that the skeletal remains of two children found in the park in the 1950s are only two of the many bodies that turn up in the park every so often. It’s that kind of park, and Taylor deftly weaves their story with the Professor’s deep reconnaissance mission to understand a cast of intriguing (and mostly male) homeless people.

In the end, food and home – and the mystery of the murdered children – all come together in one unforgettable evening.

Is Taylor’s vision of homelessness and the top chef restaurant world an exercise in gritty realism? Hell, no. But it doesn’t really matter. Although this is definitely a page-turner, some of Taylor’s phrases stopped me in their tracks with their beauty and their sharp observation. Jeremy’s emotional state as he fast forwards into ruinous debt is described as a “chain of open links, waiting for some critical slackening of tension to disassociate themselves one from another…” With writing like this, the occasional lapses are more noticeable, perhaps. Dante Beale, the grain-fed epitome of corporate greed, is too on-the-nose. He owns a coffee chain called Inferno. He plays chess. And he’s called Dante, for pete’s sake. Likewise, some lesser characters veer into caricature, but Taylor’s right on the money for the important bits.

It’s not really a ‘slice of life in Vancouver circa 1996’; it’s a fabulist’s tale of youthful folly, understanding fathers and father figures, and what back to the land really means.

Cascadia

Although I am an American, I consider myself, equally (if not more so), a Cascadian. Culturally speaking, I feel a closer affinity to British Columbians than Americans residing on the Eastern Seaboard. Even if my national allegiance lies with a New Yorker, my culinary tradition, weather, and regional tongue align with a Vancouverite.

Given the regional connections between Seattle and Vancouver, I thoroughly enjoyed Timothy Taylor’s novel, Stanley Park.

Culinary Crips versus Bloods

Set in Vancouver at the beginning of the new millennium, Stanley Park tells the story of Chef Jeremy Papier. Upon completing training in France, Jeremy returns to his native British Columbia, inspired to run a restaurant imparting simple and locally rooted dishes for the Vancouver public. Jeremy’s inspiration extends from his culinary training.

“Crips versus Bloods. Crip cooks were critical. They fused, they strove for innovation, they were post-national. They called themselves artists. They tended to stack things like mahi mahi and grilled eggplant in wobbly towers glued together with wasabi mayonnaise, and were frequently suspicious of butter. Vegetarianism was an option for Crips but not for Bloods. Blood cooks were respectful of tradition, nostalgic even. Canonical, interested in the veracity of things culinary, linked to ‘local’ by inheritance or adoption of a culture, linked to a particular manner and place of being. Blood cooks liked sweetbreads and pot-au-feu. Bloods ate tacos, bratwurst, borscht. They used lard and as much foie gras as they could get their hands on. They made cassoulet to the recipe left by Louis Cazals and, depending on where the Bloods called home, they might like kimchi, salmon planked on cedar, fish stew with sausage, or twice-cooked duck.
Chef Jeremy Papier was Blood” (32-33).

Partnering with a talented culinary artist named Jules and funded by local entrepreneur and childhood neighbor Dante Beal, Jeremy opens the Monkey’s Paw Bistro.

The Kite of Debt

Despite critical acclaim, debt mounts as Jeremy strains to keep the restaurant afloat.

“People rarely set out to kite in a controlled way. More often financial kites soar out of sight with terrifying speed, the virtual string burning through your fingers. Jeremy could remember precisely how his own went aloft. It started with his line of credit at the Toronto Dominion Bank, $230,000 guaranteed by Dante Beale” (54).

Struggling to survive, Jeremy soon finds the reins of his restaurant in the hands of Dante, his financier. CEO of Inferno Coffee, an obvious allusion to Starbucks, Dante represents everything Jeremy hates—the Crip to his Blood.

When a Blood Becomes a Crip

A perpetual profit maximizer, Dante shuts down The Monkey’s Paw and remodels the restaurant for a grand opening as Gerriamo’s, a post-national restaurant and product of extensive market research. Dante maintains the employment of Jeremy as executive chef but the arrangement leaves Jeremy bitter and his friend, Jules, unemployed.

As Gerriamo’s grand opening inches closer, Jeremy plans the best menu he has ever prepared.

Stanley Park: A Homeless Sanctuary

In addition to this narrative thread resides a secondary story surrounding Jeremy and his father, a professor studying the homeless of Stanley Park. Living with the park inhabitants, Jeremy’s dad receives uninterrupted access to these peripatetic people.

While studying, the professor encounters the story of the Babes in the Wood, Stanley Park’s unsolved murder mystery from the early 50s when the skeletons of two young boys were found in the dense forest of the city park.

Requesting library research from Jeremy, the father and son draw close as Jeremy relays information about the case and becomes accustomed to the inhabitants and dining rituals of Stanley Park.

“Then he lay back in the ferns to let it all flow over him. Jeremy stood at the centre of his own diagram, the Professor thought. In the thick of his own woods. A joined drama. People turning against the wind, returning to Eden. Those seeking reconciliation with the stable rhythms of the earth, with their own beginnings. Here, in the park, where out of desperation, for lack of options, a living theatre of rootedness had been reborn from distant tragedy. In Jeremy’s kitchen, where a sense of lost connection played out in culinary theatrics about the return to a familiar soil” (194).

Global or Local?

As the two narratives intertwine, questions of culture, rootedness, and place in a globalized society become apparent. Which aspects of life are we willing to submit to the tides of global commerce? Which ones will we fight tooth and nail for?

I find the topics of Stanley Park particularly current despite being a decade old. With society questioning food in the wake of Food, Inc. and The Omnivore's Dilemma, Stanley Park offers a fictional addition to this “food” canon.

Even though I struggled at times to discover the connections between the novel’s storylines, I enjoyed the local flavor of Stanley Park. A product of Cascadia, the culinary tradition of Vancouver resembles Seattle’s tradition. I enjoyed the themes present in Stanley Park and applaud Taylor’s writing. If you are interested in food or Vancouver, read this book.

Originally published at http://www.wherepenmeetspaper.com

A subplot of this book could be called "Terroir Terror" - but it is hard to reconcile the true-crime aspect of a 50 year old mystery with the rest of the plot - especially since we never really find out why the crime happened.

The rest of the book is very concerned with the notion of belonging to a place - the terroir so to speak. Jeremy the chef only cooks with local ingredients if he can, and his father is a sociologist studying Stanley Park and its homeless (or who call Stanley Park home). The food writing as Jeremy goes through the ups and downs of his career is very good - and the description of the Bloods and the Crips as related to foodie styles is great. And any book that says the beer "La Fin du Monde" is the best in the world is going to get an extra star in my book!

Very enjoyable read. Jeremy Papier is one of those characters that will stick around in my consciousness for a spell; I became quite attached. His journey toward comfort in his own skin, and confidence in his convictions was a satisfying ride. Wonderful descriptions of food – textures, aromas, colours, arrangements – and the restaurant game. Splendidly layered portrayal of Vancouver, from its corporate towers (and evils) to its dispossessed, but sometimes richer, inhabitants of the green depths of Stanley Park.

I read this for my third year Contemporary Canadian Literature lecture course and I enjoyed reading it again in my spare time. I think the symbolism is a touch heavy handed. I'm all for making something clear to your audience but no one likes being beat over the head with anything. I enjoyed the journey of Jeremy from the Monkey's Paw Bistro, to Gerriamo's, to the Food Caboose. He is an idiot with his finances but that adds to the realism since who knows how many people fall into this trap every day. The Professor was interesting but I didn't really care so much about the Babes in the Wood narrative than I did the simple study of homeless people in the park.

It's a great 'light' read all in all and I really did enjoy it despite some of the problems I had with it.

I enjoyed this book a lot, but then I'm a foodie myself. We had some good dining experiences in Vancouver when we visited several years ago (time to go back!), though none quite as...er...local as the penultimate one depicted in this novel. Some good characters drawn, such as Dante Beale and the Professor, but I was left feeling that the motif of the two murdered children was forced and left dramatically unresolved, not that I was expecting the murder mystery to be explained further or anything that droll, but the connection of the babes in the woods to the main plot line was left hanging and essentially dropped well before the end of the book with no return. That is really my only complaint, otherwise I recommend this read highly.

Really fascinating book -- I will certainly never visit Stanley Park and feel the same way about it again. I enjoyed the main character's experiences with good and the restaurant world. This may have been Timothy Taylor's best book.

Due to our recent weekend in Canada, I came home with several new books by Canadian authors or stories set in Canada, including this one: Stanley Park. If we hadn't had such a great time visiting Vancouver and Stanley Park, then I might not have enjoyed this story as much as I did. There just wasn't enough excitement, mystery, romance or adventure for my taste, and the food descriptions sometimes made me feel ill. Oh well, check it out, if you love Vancouver, BC.

I really, really liked this story; well-written, entertaining and artfully layered. In the right forum, this book would produce a fruitful discussion on themes and symbolism, I’d love to pick it apart over a bottle of vino.

In the meantime, I can only speak of my own superficial analysis and key take-aways. And for me, Stanley Park is a journey through the restaurant landscape, navigating the influences of two polarizing pillars. The dichotomy of Blood and Crips is the single most important theme.

The two factions cannot exist without one another and in order to succeed they must work together. Unfortunately, the restaurant game is designed in favour of the Crips. It’s about business first, food second. Jeremy learns this when his pure attempt at a Blood restaurant fails in a financial mess. When partnering with a Crip proves to be too much of a departure in values, Jeremy in the end breaks away from the game entirely in order to preserve what matters most.

Stanley Park, Babes in the Wood, and the final chess match between the Professor and Dante are all worth a deeper analysis. An analysis that will either support or unravel my initial review.

Anyone care for a glass of wine, a Tempranillo perhaps?