Stanley Park

A young chef who revels in local bounty, a long-ago murder that remains unsolved, the homeless of Stanley Park, a smooth-talking businessman named Dante - these are the ingredients of Timothy Taylor''s stunning debut novel - Kitchen Confidential meets The Edible Woman.

Trained in France, Jeremy Papier, the young Vancouver chef, is becoming known for his unpretentious dishes that highlight fresh, local ingredients. His restaurant, The Monkey''s Paw Bistro, while struggling financially, is attracting the attention of local foodies, and is not going unnoticed by Dante Beale, owner of a successful coffeehouse chain, Dante''s Inferno. Meanwhile, Jeremy''s father, an eccentric anthropologist, has moved into Stanley Park to better acquaint himself with the homeless and their daily struggles for food, shelter and company. Jeremy''s father also has a strange fascination for a years-old unsolved murder case, known as "The Babes in the Wood" and asks Jeremy to help him research it.Dante is dying to get his hands on The Monkey''s Paw. When Jeremy''s elaborate financial kite begins to fall, he is forced to sell to Dante and become his employee. The restaurant is closed for renovations, Inferno style. Jeremy plans a menu for opening night that he intends to be the greatest culinary statement he''s ever made, one that unites the homeless with high foody society in a paparazzi-covered celebration of "local splendour."

A young chef who revels in local bounty, a long-ago murder that remains unsolved, the homeless of Stanley Park, a smooth-talking businessman named Dante - these are the ingredients of Timothy Taylor''s stunning debut novel - "Kitchen Confidential meets "The Edible Woman.
Trained in France, Jeremy Papier, the young Vancouver chef, is becoming known for his unpretentious dishes that highlight fresh, local ingredients. His restaurant, The Monkey''s Paw Bistro, while struggling financially, is attracting the attention of local foodies, and is not going unnoticed by Dante Beale, owner of a successful coffeehouse chain, Dante''s Inferno. Meanwhile, Jeremy''s father, an eccentric anthropologist, has moved into Stanley Park to better acquaint himself with the homeless and their daily struggles for food, shelter and company. Jeremy''s father also has a strange fascination for a years-old unsolved murder case, known as "The Babes in the Wood" and asks Jeremy to help him research it.Dante is dying to get his hands on The Monkey''s Paw. When Jeremy''s elaborate financial kite begins to fall, he is forced to sell to Dante and become his employee. The restaurant is closed for renovations, Inferno style. Jeremy plans a menu for opening night that he intends to be the greatest culinary statement he''s ever made, one that unites the homeless with high foody society in a paparazzi-covered celebration of "local splendour."

Timothy Taylor is the Journey-Prize winning author of the short-story collection Silent Cruise. His second novel, Story House, will be published by Knopf Canada in April 2006. He was born in Venezuela and now lives in Vancouver.

Timothy Taylor on Timothy Taylor

I was born in Venezuela. This may be my single most exotic accomplishment although I can't take credit. My parents were travellers, each for their own reasons. My father was personally inclined to movement. He was restless, ambitious and curious. He took overseas work right after graduating from the University of Toronto in 1945. He was an electrical engineer. I remember him telling me once about an assignment he had to rebuild a power plant in the Philippine jungle that had been destroyed during the war. They had no blue prints. They just figured it out and when they flipped the switch a few weeks later, the lights did go on. After the Philippines he worked his way around the world to South America and eventually found himself in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

My mother wouldn't have chosen to live in Guayaquil, to be there for my father to meet at a Valentines Day party and fall for and woo and win just like in a Bogart film. She was a refugee. A middle class kid of Jewish decent whose home happened to be Germany. Hitler put an end to this life. After spending the war separated and in hiding, my mother's family reunited in Ecuador. Mom found work in a bookstore. My dad met her dad through work. One thing lead to another. All of them were living in this far away place. All of them must have been wondering: what happens now? I have a photo of them at the Valentine's Day party. My mom has a skirt with hearts on it. My father is wearing one of those silk Philippine dress shirts. They both look faintly stunned by the event of their meeting. I once wrote a line about this photo: "Frozen in the headlights of their own prayers." They settled in Venezuela, in some circles I'm still called by the Spanish-speaker's nickname for Timothy, which is "Timo", and this is the substance of my beginning.

We moved to Vancouver. I grew up in Horseshoe Bay: two brothers, two sisters, road hockey, slingshots, tree forts, fire cracker mayhem. Typical stuff and I loved it, but my father got restless again in the mid '70s and we packed for Alberta. I appreciate the prairies now, but at the time it would be safe to say I struggled with the move. The flatness, the dryness, the summer heat, all these were disorienting after the green wet of Vancouver. I was one of those kids with a shoebox full of poems and they became particularly tortured around this time. Long, rhyming odes to my lost home. I can't remember what I rhymed with BC Ferries, but I recall trying. I heard a recording of Dylan Thomas reading Under Milk Wood when I was about 14 and the only way I can describe the impact is to say that he made a sound I wished to duplicate. I read a bunch of my poems into my dad's clunky cassette recorder. My sister found the tape and mocked me without mercy.

I continued to think about writing, but at university I studied economics, then went on to take an MBA at Queens. This had something to do with wanting to build a life support system for my writing, I think, but I didn't exactly have a strategic plan. I just figured I'd get out there and work for awhile, accumulate some experience of life and cities and people and relationships and pump out novels on the side. It can't really be overstated how clueless I was. I was working for the TD Bank in downtown Toronto, King and Bay. It was the summer of '87, months before the market crash, and there was a frantic quality to everyday activities. Coffee. Work. Street hotdog. Work. Beers. Bed. Repeat. Go go go go go. When the folks in HR offered me a spot in sleepy Vancouver — a move no right-minded MBA grad would have considered at the time — I jumped all over it.

I lasted in banking for about four years and I wrote hardly a word. It wasn't the bank's fault. It's in my blood to need a periodic shake down, a personal cultural revolution, an uprooting that if it isn't physical — I was finally back in the rain forest where I wanted to be all along — is at least mental. So I quit. I started freelance writing and just about the time the hard financial realities of freelance writing were becoming clear to me, I landed a consulting contract. A salmon fisheries policy assignment that led eventually to other work and ended up growing into a small but busy consulting practice.

Salmon changed my life. They swim away, they mature, they return to the spot where they were born (by smell, some have it), they have sex and then they die. They describe a cycle that is heavy with lesson and, besides, you can eat them. This is rich stuff. Once I got busy working in salmon fisheries policy, I started writing Stanley Park, a novel that, not incidentally, concerns itself with food and how people relate to the place where they live. Four years later — which is about the time a sockeye salmon takes to complete the story of its life — I finished it.

What happens now?

Well, you can only take the metaphoric power of salmon so far, so I intend to head back out to sea, as it were. My second novel is called El Primero, in which the reader will meet (among others) people who build buildings and people who sell counterfeit brand name products. There is a reason why it's called El Primero despite being, technically, el segundo, but this must be discovered on the page.

I'm not sure I can define what I'm writing about in the macro sense or what single thing it is that ties all my writing together. I do know that I like story, if that's not too obvious a statement. I like narrative movement, revelation, surprise. I am interested in the cycle of people's lives. Their projects, appetites, opinions, fears and flaws. And the imprint of their beginnings.

An interview with Timothy Taylor by Scott Sellers

A magazine interview with Timothy Taylor appeared recently under the headline, "Ought To Be Famous." For now, the 37-year-old Vancouver writer will have to make do with being one of the most talked-about talents on the Canadian literary scene. Last fall, Taylor garnered national attention when he won the prestigious Journey Prize for short fiction for his story, "Doves of Townsend." What made the victory remarkable was the fact that Taylor had written two of the three stories shortlisted for the prize.

This spring, Timothy Taylor returns to the spotlight with the publication of his debut novel. Stanley Park is a powerful and gripping tale of food, family and the mysteries of the city. Jeremy Papier is a young chef dedicated to creating a unique British Columbia cuisine by celebrating locally grown ingredients in the food he creates. Yet trying to stay true to his culinary creed is a struggle, and the mounting debts for his restaurant, The Monkey's Paw Bistro, prove it. To complicate matters, Jeremy is becoming more and more troubled by his strained relationship with his father, an anthropologist engaged in an unorthodox field of study. As Jeremy struggles to save his restaurant, he embarks upon an extraordinary adventure that involves unusual (and illegal) financial schemes, the homeless of Stanley Park, a decades-old unsolved murder case, a smooth-talking business man with questionable motives, and the careful preparations for an urban feast that readers will never forget.

Q. A journalist recently described you as "an overnight success after a decade of hard work." How great a challenge has it been to get to this stage in your writing career?

A. It was hard work, sure. I think the challenge was two-fold. First, I started quite late. I came out of MBA school, did four years in banking, then ran my own Pacific fisheries consulting practice for about seven years. I wrote a little during this time but I didn't really get serious until five years ago. As a result, I never built a community of other writers around me. I was writing on instinct, without any reliable way of estimating my own chance of success. This was kind of scary on occasion.
I guess the second challenge lay in the simple fact that it's difficult to have serious writing ambitions and run your own business at the same time. Both pursuits deserve your full attention, but writing won't return a living wage at the beginning, so there are some hard realities. It doesn't help that the two communities, artists and merchant/professionals, are frequently suspicious of and critical of one another. To be frank, when it inevitably came out that I was also a writer, the news was not always well received by my professional colleagues. And there was some distrust going the other way too.

Despite all of this, I stress that I could not have begun any other way. I needed exposure to people in different fields with problems and issues and objectives outside the world of writing. If I had tried to start a novel in my mid-20s after studying creative writing, I can't imagine what I would have written about. I admire people who succeed this way and, recently, I've met quite a few.

Q. Through the character of Jeremy Papier, the young chef at the centre of Stanley Park, you offer readers a fascinating inside look at the food world. Where did your knowledge of the food community come from?

A. Researching the community of commercial cooks, I read a lot. I also talked to a number of chefs and visited a kitchen in action. Together, this added up to quite a bit of colourful and useful stuff. Everything from professional tricks and techniques to how cooks move in a kitchen and talk to each other. As far as coming to understand the community of diners, the research was a little more subjective. Every time I went to a restaurant, I tried to get a feel for the kind of person that liked the place. And after you read enough restaurant reviews, likewise, you start to pick up on what the so-called trends are. So it was kind of an agglomeration of research techniques through which I tried to come to some practical knowledge of how things worked in commercial kitchens and, at the same time, develop my own opinions about culinary fashion.

Q. Vancouver's homeless play an important role in the novel. The men and women who flow into Stanley Park after dark create a unique community for themselves, an almost netherworld within the city. You give the characters that inhabit this world, like Caruzo and Chladek, great dignity. In creating such a powerful portrait, did you feel a sense of responsibility in writing about the plight of the homeless?

A. There is a risk in writing about homelessness in anything other than a realistic way, because you don't want to diminish the misery of it. On some fundamental level, living out-of-doors is about getting rained on and about being cold and about eating food that you find in dumpsters. There is nothing romantic about it. Also, much of what we see on the streets is the product of untreated mental illness and drug addiction. So, in answer to the question, I feel tremendous responsibility primarily not to abuse the reality of the situation.

That said, the misery of homelessness doesn't imply a lack of humanity or individuality or personal story. When I wrote about characters like Caruzo and Chladek, I was trying to avoid the idea that they could only be legitimate people if they were somehow rescued from their homelessness. They are who they are, and they bring their histories to where they are just as everybody else does, in some tangled mix of fluke and predetermination.

Q. Over the years, the character called the Professor has become obsessed with one of Stanley Park's great mysteries: the true-life murder case known as "The Babes in the Wood." Can you offer some background about the case and how you became interested in it?

A. The skeletons of two little kids were discovered in Stanley Park by groundskeepers in 1953. Forensics dated the murder to the fall of 1947, when the kids would have been about five or six. When the story was made public, a young woman came forward who had been in the park in October of 1947 and had seen a woman with a little boy and girl of about that age enter the forest, then emerge later without the kids. It sounded like a solid lead and the police solicited information from anyone who knew about a little boy and girl having gone missing. Thousands of tips came in, including, bizarrely, one from Clifford Olson's mother (Olson would have been a child himself at that time). In any case, none of the tips came to anything and years later, in the mid-90s, DNA evidence revealed that the two murdered children were in fact brothers. I have since been told that the original testimony of the young woman has been discounted as a result, although you have to wonder if a five-year-old boy might not have easily been mistaken for a girl, especially at a distance.

I don't remember exactly when I first heard about the case, but I can tell you that I read the story at some point, probably when I was a kid, and that it drilled into my subconscious and lodged there. I know this because when I began to develop my ideas for the park side of this novel, from the beginning I had this sense that Stanley Park was twinned with an old unsolved murder of two children. And I thought I was making it up. Of course, as I began to read about park history, the true story emerged. It gave me chills when I first realized I had been "imagining" something that really took place.

It's noteworthy that the unsolved-crime people with the Vancouver Police Department still take the case very seriously. True story: I heard from a misinformed source that there had been a Babes in the Wood deathbed confession somewhere. I searched everywhere and could not confirm this. Finally, I posted a note on an Internet bulletin board concerning itself with BC events and history. I had no responses. Weeks later, I was in the Vancouver Police Museum and I was chatting with the curator. I asked him if he'd heard anything about the confession and he became very, very interested. No, he said, he hadn't, but he'd heard that someone had posted this rumour on an Internet bulletin board. He was very keen to know if there was anything to this. So, they were paying attention.