Customer Reviews

Stanley Park: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

This is an odd book, at once intriguing and annoying. I'll
focus on texture and style, rather than plot, which other
reviewers have adequately misdescribed. The major character and
primary theme is cooking as profession and art. This thread is
developed with extraordinary realism and, probably, accuracy, to
the point where I became rather bored with it -- gourmet dining
is not my thing, much less the exacting procedures which lie
behind it. However, someone who is interested in it will
probably be entranced.

Concurrent with this thread is another, that of the major
character's father, who is a sociologist who, as research
toward his next book, goes to live in Stanley Park with the
homeless. The homeless are shamelessly romanticized,
Thomas-Hart-Benton, Cannery-Row folk style; one can hardly
open his toothless mouth without uttering eternal truths
cast in Symbolist poetry, and they all live happily in the
underbrush by trapping sparrows and raccoons. Maybe it is
my warped personality, but having been among and of the poor
much more than I would have chosen, I find that sort of
fantasizing about them very annoying.

Yet another strand involves a businessman who appears
to represent global capitalism; in this strand, the major and
other characters are not represented either realistically or
romantically, but rather in the flashy, baroque, post-post
style of with-it magazines and web sites. And yet further
back there's a strand of honest yet exalted Burgundian
cookery, love, and hiking in a '30s-novel sort of France.

When these varous strands impinge on one another, either
as a natural development of their own internal logic or
because the author feels it's time to screw them together
and give the book some semblance of coherence, the effect
is sometimes patently artifical and labored, sometimes
very clever, sometimes both at once, as when the hero chef, at
the novel's climax, causes dozens of very expensive guests of
the global capitalist (now his boss) to ingest raccoon obtained
from his father's homeless friends. Despite the grinding of
the works, some humorous moments are obtained, as when the hero
explains to a superhip reporter lady that his restaurant is
"beyond international. Beyond globalized. ... We belong to
no cuisine, to no people, to no culinary morality. We belong
only to those who can can reach us and understand us and afford
us. Gerriamo's is post-national.... Post-national Groove
Food." It's too bad these moments aren't a bit more frequent
and a bit more savage. Our world cries out for another Georg
Grosz.

As with some other authors, the characterizations of the lesser
actors are more vivid and memorable than those of the more
important ones. The hero in particular seems to lack particular
form. This isn't necessarily a defect; since most of the novel
takes place from his point of view, a certain ambiguity and
amorphousness may enable readers to imagine themselves into
his person more easily than if he were of a crustier sort.
(I don't mean to say he is passive -- he has many odd ideas
and is willing to act vigorously in pursuit of them. But
beyond cookery, there is no particular coherence or color
to them.)

Narratively, the story moves forward by fits and starts. Since
much of it is attuned to the hero's business success or lack of
it in the world of Vacouver restaurants, it has a certain
amount of formal movement which will probably be adequate for
those who demand a certain level of narrativity, that is, "a
good story". They may be annoyed at the other threads, which
don't go anywhere very much except as they're dragged along
by the main action.

I guess in sum I'd have to say that I didn't like this
book very much. Perhaps its postmodern incoherence was too
much for it to carry. But I do hope the author will persist,
and I'll probably pick up his next effort with hope and
interest. I'll be clever here at the end and say next time
he might let the ingredients cook together longer and
figure each other out.

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.

...but some of its elements fiddle around a bit too much with the old taste buds.

The bulk of Taylor's first effort is assured, rich, with touches of flair you should expect from a rookie. He is, as I am wont to say, a writer's writer through about 80% of the book. You know you're in the hands of someone who sets his heights high, and for the most part, attains these altitudes. Indeed, it's a joy to be along for the journey.

However, at several points, he goes entirely off the rails, or, to maintain the culinary theme, mixes up his courses, gets distracted with ingredients he probably should have left on the shelf, and serves up something tepid.

I was not satisfied with how he intertwined the narrative threads. I didn't like the elements that were left unresolved. And mostly, I thought the pronounced style change at the novel's conclusion was...well...tepid.

I've given it such a high mark mostly because I appreciated his verve, his deft touch, and the fact that he made me want to consume what he had been concocting.

This is a far better book than his sophomore effort, and makes me look forward all the more to his third publication.

Can I have the bill, please...?

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).

Anyone interested in cooking should read this book. The back-of-house descriptions are interesting in the same way as 'Kitchen Confidential'. The bonus is that there is a murder mystery embedded in this book. The Bloods and Crips thing is very interesting, as is the startup of a big-time gourmet resturant.

I liked Taylor's style of building suspense by making you wonder what he is talking about...you have to read another few pages to find out, and by that time another element of the story has crept in. I worked at a restaurant in Paris, and bought pots and knives through a chef I knew there. I now live in the Vancouver area, so it was great fun to read names of places and things that are familiar. I also am old enough to remember the little children being found in the park. All these subplots, all connected to his "cultiver ton jardin" theme, made this culinary delight a thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying read.

I have to agree with a previous reviewer that this is an odd book, and that makes it hard to rate. There are numerous flashbacks, and numerous side digressions into food preparation. The main plot is about Jeremy Papier, a young man who has received training as a chef, and who wishes to have his own upscale restaurant. There is a secondary plot about his father, who is an anthropologist living among the homeless in Stanley Park in order to gather material for his next book. Then there is Dante, his father's neighbor who is a somewhat cutthroat businessman wanting to take over the restaurant world. Add in a sprinkling of the homeless, living in Stanley Park, various people in the food industry, and companies issuing credit cards, and you have a complex plot.

Jeremy is an outstanding chef, but a poor businessman who does not have financial training. He is undercapitalized, and gets in over his head, trying to live on credit cards by creatively kiting debt from one card to the next. He is also distracted by his father who has Jeremy preparing meals from the bounty of the land (including ducks from the park's lagoon) for the homeless. There is a side issue as his father is obsessed with the unsolved murders of two children in the park about 50 years earlier. You will also learn a lot about living off the land, including how to catch starlings, ducks, and even swans.

The novel seems to start out slow, and is a slow read, but it gets interesting as you reach the end. It has its moments. When you get to the part about the raccoons, you will be laughing out loud. Dante discovers there is payback and, of course, the hero continues on.

Having recently taken friends twice to the Garden Room at Anchuca, I can verify that some of the best restaurants do not advertise. You have to know where they are and when they are open. They have single seatings with limited tables. Reservations are usually required. Expect to spend a little money, but the food is worth the price.

This novel features Jeremy Papier, a chef struggling with major financial problems, his father, "the Professor," an anthropologist writing about the schizophrenic of Vancouver's Stanley Park and showing signs of becoming one himself, and Dante Beale, a British Columbian counterpart to Howard Schultz who owns an espresso coffee chain tellingly called "Inferno." Dante, a former neighbor of Professor Papier and his son, admires Jeremy's skill tremendously and would like to open a restaurant with him. But he can't resist his own unbounded faith in his corporate resesearch, to the point of telling Jeremy what color food to cook, or his tendency to micromanage. Several other characters, most closely involved with Jeremy, and the Professor's research on the death of two children decades before complete the story nicely. More than the sum of its parts, like any fine meal.

I initially looked for this book after reading an enjoyable article by the author in "Cooking Light" magazine. After reading all of the reviews, I decided to purchase it. I'm a wanna-be foodie and love reading books set in the restaurant world; I read cookbooks for fun and generally finish 2-3 books a week. However, as much as I struggled, I finally gave up half way through the book. It did not hold my attention and the subplot which seemed way out of left field, I didn't care about. Someone compared (or at least likened) this book to "Kitchen Confidential," yet I didn't see anything remotely close. I used to work in the restaurant business and I could truly relate to "Kitchen Confidential." This book was not even close. I hate giving up on a book - waste of my time and money, but I truly thought that in this case, it was worth it. If you are anything like me, and like to be "hooked" right away, not able to put a book down because it's just THAT good, then this isn't the book for you. His writing was very good; however, for me, he failed on putting everything together.