In the Skin of a Lion

Ondaatje's luminous novel gives back the immigrant workers written out of the making of Toronto in the 1910s and 1920s, following Patrick Lewis among the men who built the city's bridges and waterworks. The real Toronto is its stage: the great Bloor Street Viaduct rising over the Don Valley, the immigrant tanning district, the perilous tunnel dug out under Lake Ontario, and the cathedral-like waterworks that R.C. Harris built to purify the city's water.

Nicholas Temelcoff

The Bloor Street Viaduct

Part 1

High on the half-built viaduct, the Macedonian rigger Nicholas Temelcoff swings on his ropes and, in the book's signature image, catches a nun who falls from the bridge in the dark. Ondaatje restores the unnamed immigrant men who built the span to the centre of the city's story.

Part 1

explicit The novel's great opening is set on the building of the Prince Edward (Bloor Street) Viaduct over the Don Valley, a real Toronto bridge completed in 1918; the daredevil bridge-worker Temelcoff is drawn from the immigrant labourers who built it.

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Clara Dickens

The lakeshore and downtown

Part 1

Patrick's search for the disappeared millionaire Ambrose Small draws him to the elusive Clara, and to the glittering downtown world that stands on the labour of the tunnels and bridges. Ondaatje keeps setting the owners' Toronto against the builders', asking whose story the city has agreed to tell.

Parts 1 and 3

explicit The world of the vanished millionaire Ambrose Small and his mistress Clara belongs to the moneyed downtown and lakeshore Toronto that the workers' city is built beneath; sited in the real central city.

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