Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fine dining from unexpected sources, June 30, 2002
Food is THE staple of life, the most primordial element of mankind's continuing survival. Without food, without sustenance, man withers and dies, empty and unsatisfied. Food is good, and everyone knows it. So why do we continually shovel it down our throats without a thought as to the preparation, the presentation, the simple TASTE of the substance? We need food, but we rarely give two thoughts as to its true importance in our lives.Timothy Taylor has come to the same conclusion, that man has ignored the nobility of food and its prepartion for long enough. It's time to remind the common folk of what good food can be, an entire experience that can be savoured in one's mind for weeks on end. Taylor has risen to this challenge with admirable verve; his STANLEY PARK is a true feast for the mind. STANLEY PARK (named after a famous park in Vancouver, British Columbia) follows the exploits of Jeremy Papier, chef par excellance. Unfortunately for Jeremy, what he has in talent, he lacks in financial acumen, and his restaurant (The Monkey's Paw) is continually on the verge of complete collapse. Jeremy is a Blood; that is, a chef respectful of local culinary traditions and customs, using only local produce for his meals. He finds it increasingly difficult to match wits with the Crips, chefs who consider themselves artists first and foremost, creating unusual meals though unorthodox combinations of foods (eg., Prawns with Spiced Yam Wafers, Grappa and Thai Ginger Cream). In a culture where being hip is being odd, Jeremy is all the odder for sticking to his Blood guns. Add to the mix an increasing pressure by famous coffee businessman Dante (owner of Dante's Inferno coffeehouses, a thinly veiled attack on Starbucks)to purchase Jeremy's talent and restaurant, and a father who has taken to living in Stanley Park to study the homeless, and Jeremy's life has taken on mythic proportions of personal angst. Aas may be expected, Taylor excels in his detailed descriptions of life within a restaurant; the highs, the lows, the dizzying speed of food preparation and service, the exhaustion of a day's work, the pleasure of creating something that will be destroyed within minutes. Taylor captures the focussed pressure of a busy restaurant that will be intimately familiar with anyone in the service industry, and possibly stupefying to anyone without previous experience. The amount of talent and work that can go into every meal is rendered with perfect prose; Taylor's descriptions of food rank among the best, alongside Laura Esquivel's LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE and a particularly vivid passage from Richard Condon's PRIZZI'S HONOUR that still haunts this reviewer years later. And Jeremy's efforts to avoid the collapse of his dream are on par with the desperate real-life efforts to stave off bankruptcy in Johnathan Harr's A CIVIL ACTION, but far funnier. Taylor also nicely captures Jeremy's anxiety of 'selling out' to Dante; as an antidote, he begins to hang out with his father every night in the park, preparing meals for the homeless from whatever materials are readily available in a large park (use your imagination). Jeremy's ultimate success, combining these two diverse factions of his life, leads to a final act of culinary greatness that is all the more appealing for its rather unusual menu. Taylor, however, falters in a subplot concerning the past disappearance of two children in Stanley Park many decades previous. While Jeremy's father becomes infatuated with the rmyth that has grown around the children, Taylor's final meaning concerning this subplot remains ambiguous at best. It is an interesting story, but it jars the reader away for the main plot, and never firmly gels as a complete element of the story. Otherwise, STANLEY PARK is a joy to read, a wondrous creation almost equal to the meals Jeremy creates. The fact that the mouth waters at Taylor's descriptions of Jeremy's feasts is proof enough of his talent as a writer. Luckily, Taylor can also pull off an interesting plot with remarkable characterizations as well.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rootless in Vancouver, June 30, 2002
A way to a reader's heart, according to this novel, is through the stomach. Using rather bland prose but obviously piquant analogies -- to make it easy on the brain, I suppose -- Taylor serves up the late twentieth century urban food scene as a multi-course meal for thought about where we are in our relation to where we happen to be living.When we meet Chef Jeremy Papier, his world of cooks and kooks is neatly divided into Bloods, "who are respectful of tradition," and Crips, "who are critical and "post-national." Enter Dante Beal, another "foreigner" of sorts, who is the Devil incarnate, as identified by the young and sickly son of Jeremy's old friend. Dante has brought the rage of culinary post-nationalism to new highs -- or should we say lows -- with his chain of Inferno coffee shops ... and, yes, this is a not-so-subtle wink-wink at the proliferation of Starbucks in the Western world. Love, sex, family ties, and other character-shaping aspects take a minor flavoring role in this novel in which battles are fought not with wits or sabers but faddish chef's knives and subterfuge is squirreled -- literally.... The real protagonist of this novel is an idea that tries to reclaim the "local" from the many ways it has been hijacked by multiculturalism, globalization, post-nationalism, post-modernism, and other post-isms. Blood is where it's at in the kitchen. It is blood that sanctifies place, the novel implies. The Crip cooks have drained their fusion dishes of the power of blood when they went borrowing isolated ingredients of local foods from here and there. Their notion of place is nothing more than the pride of self, or so the novel implies. Though their intentions may be good ... well, you know what they say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Which brings us Taylor's reinterpretation of Dante's Inferno reduced, like a fine sauce, to the notion of the globalization of food experience with no place or no self, however fused, in mind ... only expansion. And if you recall the original Dante's Inferno, you will surely remember that the worst place in hell was reserved for those who betrayed their country, who sinned against place.... I have to hand it to Taylor: he has certainly cooked up a plot that is sure to please different philosophical appetites. His quest for the binding power of the local reminds me of my own struggles around this issue. I was once a transplant in Vancouver myself (as the author seem to be), and this novel captured for me something of the feel of that city that I could never quite articulate back then: the great divide between people's quiet desperation and their utter lack of awareness of the roots of their psychic anemia.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great new writer, May 14, 2002
Taylor is a truly gifted writer and Stanley Park does not disappoint. I picked this book up when I was vacationing in Vancouver and even after I returned home, I was able to relive my stay there through this book.. If you are a fan of Vancouver, cooking, or great literature, pick this one up. Taylor also has an impressive book of short stories called Silent Cruise but I believe that you can only purchase this one in Canada. I was able to order it from Chapters.com (a Canadian book store).
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