Open Book Toronto looks at The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn
Amy Lavender Harris at Open Book Toronto has long been interested in the mythology of Toronto: writers who create myth out of the city. Most recently, she's written about Toronto myth-making in literature and how it relates to Sean Dixon's new novel, The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn:
Toronto is a city in search of a mythology, a narrative that will transform it from a collection of bedroom communities into a city with a centre and a soul -- however tarnished or glittering that might be. In search of such a narrative, three kinds of myth-makers have turned their attentions to Toronto ...
... The third group of myth-makers is considerably rarer. Its writers blend the real with the surreal in order to make myths not only within Toronto but of the city itself. The first writer to do so in a concerted way was 'mythopoeic' poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, much of whose work (the stories in Noman's Land and poems in Afterworlds in particular) explicitly mythologizes familiar Toronto spaces and events, such as Honest Ed's, Caribana and Henry Moore's famous bronze Archer sculpture anchoring Nathan Phillips Square. Fellow poet bpNichol's Martyrology series accomplishes a similar --if more widely ranging -- end. Two subsequent writers, Darren O'Donnell (in Your Secrets Sleep With Me) and Claudia Dey (in Stunt) have extended MacEwen's practice into an exemplary tradition, but the true inheritor of MacEwen's mythopoeic legacy may be Sean Dixon, whose The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn turns a vivid imagination upon Toronto.
Toronto is at a point where it requires a new narrative, one to bolster it during a period of restraint and recrimination. And into the breach steps Dixon's principal protagonists: a pierced, punk-looking young woman named Kip Flynn, who adorns her transient business-woman's body like others might a home, "with glittery baubles, pretty lampshades, old keepsakes, shrines [and] hidden closets" and her friend, roommate and sometimes nemesis Nancy, "an urban explorer, builderer and anti-development activist" who, as Dixon writes, "took pleasure in infiltrating new condo towers for the purpose of liberating collections of cockroaches and mice ..."
... By immortalizing structures, events and spaces as diverse as an apartment built into the side of the Dundas Street bridge just west of Lansdowne, a fatal subway crash, the buried watercourse of Garrison Creek, the ruins of the Guild Inn, Kensington Market and the Mies Towers, The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn invites readers to perceive Toronto as a city whose buildings, neighbourhoods and civic infrastructure -- and the struggles to preserve them -- carry a historic, even mythical significance in a city perched perennially on the verge of becoming.
Read the full article at Open Book Toronto.
