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TORONTO - In Rabindranath Maharaj's new novel "The Amazing Absorbing Boy," a Trinidadian teen is sent to live with his father in Toronto after the death of his mother.
His arrival in Canada is a harsh one: Samuel is ill-prepared for the bracing weather and is met by an indifferent father. As the boy slowly adjusts, his view of the city is informed by his love of comic books, which represent a world, Maharaj says, that echoes the immigrant experience.
"The comic book character is always an outsider, somebody who is trying to fit in, whether it's mutants or X-Men or whatnot," Maharaj, 54, said in a recent interview.
"In trying to fit in, they have a ... more honest or authentic view of what the place is. ... They live on the fringes, on the margins in some respects. But in living (there) they tend to have a really good view."
Samuel, who lives with his father in a high-rise in the impoverished Regent Park neighbourhood, spends his initial months exploring the city, trying to determine his place.
He takes on a couple of dead-end jobs. He befriends a rag-tag group who meet at Coffee Time, whiles away days at the downtown reference library and hangs out at Union Station.
Maharaj saw the station - one of the city's main transportation hubs - as another prime opportunity to explore his comic book metaphor.
The author notes that parts of the 2000 film "X-Men" were shot in Union Station, and that the Superman comic was created with Toronto as a model.
"There's a kind of disconnection, I felt, in Toronto, between different groups. ... Union Station, it was something like that, except in a more compressed place," he says.
"The main character, Samuel, said ... he felt comfortable (in Union Station) but it reminded him of one of these 'Star Wars' bars where there were aliens with three eyes sitting right next to people with snouts, and so on, without noticing the difference.
"Union Station, it's almost a kind of magical place to him, because there are so many different people there, not seeming to notice the differences. He, of course, notices the differences because that's part of his function, part of what he wants to do is to understand Canada. ... He needs to make sense of this place."
"The Amazing Absorbing Boy" is the fourth novel for Maharaj, who came to Canada himself from Trinidad in the early 1990s.
He first pursued a master's in creative writing in New Brunswick and later moved to Ontario, where he taught for several years in a Pickering high school (he now lives in Ajax, a bedroom community east of Toronto).
His last book was 2005's acclaimed "A Perfect Pledge," which was nominated for both the Rogers Writers' Trust and Commonwealth Writers prizes.
"The Amazing Absorbing Boy," says Maharaj, came to him in three phases. The first was during his stint as a high school teacher, when he encountered many students who were the children of immigrants. The second was during his time as writer-in-residence at the reference library, when he began to think about how he viewed Toronto.
The third, he says, was the key one.
"All my novels begin with an image, a kind of stark image of something that I can't understand," he notes.
"On the GO train (the local commuter rail service) I had this image of a young fellow ... every time he blinked, the city changed. ... It became something almost amorphous."
In many ways "The Amazing Absorbing Boy" presents a fresh take on the immigrant experience, a perspective of young immigrants the author feels is rarely represented in Canadian literature.
It was important, Maharaj says, that his protagonist be a teenager.
"If I'd chosen an older narrator ... the novel itself would have been a more stereotypical kind of immigrant novel," he says.
"On one level it's an immigrant novel, but on another level it's the way people view a big city ... how they try to come to terms with what the city is .... and how they could fit in."
"Until very recently, any (novel) that moved beyond a kind of conventional way of presenting a place, a city ... may not have been acceptable. ... Things are changing."
