Toronto is a city of flukes that seem more like an almanac of a small Ohio town rather than the curriculum vitae of a city of six million. To wit: a histrionic furniture salesman with a shoplifting wife was once our mayor. Prince lived here for a couple of years. We paid a slick fellow from New York a lot of money for a giant crystal. And in the mid-1950s, a hurricane forgot that hurricanes don’t hit cities in the middle of North America, killing 81 people here and causing millions of dollars in damage.
Mark Sinnett’s novel, The Carnivore, is about that night and opens with this first line, in diction somewhere between the Book of Genesis and Al Roker: “In the beginning there was only darkness and heavy rain.”
What we think is a flat recitation turns out to be a flat recitation. Sinnett pulls back and introduces us to opening narrator Ray, a retired police officer telling a reporter in 2004 about how he became the hero of the hurricane. As a writer, Sinnett plays tricks like this but he plays them quickly, never toying with the reader. Ray’s long-suffering wife Mary enters the story and in their old age they have all the warmth between them of a couple from a murder ballad. As she describes Ray, “His robe (it is new and black and absorbent; it is much better than he deserves) parted over the revolting white knob of his knee. There might as well be no skin on him at all.”
Without revealing too much of Sinnett’s elegant arcs — The Carnivore is one of those rare literate books that cares enough about the reader to provide a plot — Sinnett uses unadorned, but no less forceful sentences, to bring Ray and Mary back to the night of the hurricane. Ray, as it turns out, is something less than a hero.
In the physicality of his writing, Sinnett is very much Canadian. This is a novel of primal elements: water, blood and mud. But as a storyteller, the Oxford-born writer is a Brit through and through, doling out information on a need-to-know basis that keeps us reading and learning more and more about his despicably fascinating characters. Sinnett has made an original, terrifying portrait of Toronto’s soul.