Pasha Malla’s People Park takes on poverty, a city-state and a celebrity magician

Author Pasha Malla’s community outreach
 

Writing is a difficult thing. It involves long hours alone, dedication to and belief in what you’re doing, the wherewithal to know that it’s a bit ridiculous, and the balls to share what you’ve created with the world.

When Toronto-based author Pasha Malla’s short story collection The Withdrawal Method was published in 2008, it racked up a number of coveted nominations and walked away with the Danuta Gleed and Trillium awards for fiction. His debut novel People Park was published earlier this month by Anansi, and follows an extensive cast of characters over Easter Weekend as the city prepares for the 25th anniversary celebration of the titular park.

It’s a dynamic novel, at once entertaining, engrossing and darkly funny (“Olpert recognized him: a manic character keen on workshopping masturbation techniques, his own involving slit fruit”). It’s also ambitious in the way all good books are ambitious, by taking chances and surprising the reader.

“I started writing this novel about Montreal in 2004, it went badly, and the essence of that novel became the essence of this novel,” Malla says. “I trashed the original project and started this, then took eight months off from writing and did some reading, figured out the characters, drew some maps.”

What results from those months of research is a city that feels both familiar and unsettling. The khaki-clad New Fraternal League of Men are policing the island state, citizens broadcast their lives on We-TV and make frequent trips to places like Guardian Bridge and Lower Olde Towne, all of which sets the stage for a parody of contemporary urban existence.

“I read some urban theory books by Lewis Mumford, which were written in the early 20th century, that felt very contemporary and acutely speaking to what I thought problems with cities were. And by ‘problems with cities,’” Malla adds with a laugh, “I need to qualify that by saying these were just things friends and I were talking about in bars with very ill-informed ideas.”

In the book, however, these ideas have coalesced into serious themes revolving around community and poverty. In order to create People Park, thousands of lower-income families were relocated, and much of the novel is spent examining the aftermath.

“If you live in a city, you become attuned to what things are and aren’t working. I volunteer with people who have mental illness in Toronto. Working with those people and seeing how a certain demographic of the population is ignored, I became interested in how world-class cities, as Toronto claims it is, have this exorbitant wealth, but still this gaping social problem.”

One of Malla’s boldest moves, however, is the character of Raven, a velour- tracksuited magician who calls himself an “illustrationist” because he reveals rather than discloses the truth. The character both is and isn’t a stand-in for the author.

“Celebrity magicians are absurd, they are some of the most absurd people around,” Malla says, “but they also do really cool shit. I believe deeply in fiction and I believe in what I’m doing and take it very seriously, but there’s an egoism to writing a novel.

I wanted to address that in the character. He’s not self-aware but I hope I’ve imbued him with enough elements that it’s obvious he’s an egomaniac and his idea of truth is not everybody else’s.”

Reading this novel and talking with Malla, it’s clear that more than anything, this is a book about the love of books. He’s open about the influence writers like Stephen King and Roald Dahl had on him as a kid, and how he revisited the things that stayed with him from those books when he was writing People Park.

“I get so much excitement from reading, I love books that make me want to write and I love books that make me realize that I’m a terrible writer. Every now and then I’ll read a book that’ll leave me flabbergasted that a human being made it. Reading fiction is one of the most intimate things you can do with another human being, there’s sex and reading basically, how else can you get in someone else’s head?” ■