None of the other neighbourhood toughs will bother Michael while Francis is around, but Francis is also resentful of Michael’s constant presence and dependence. He is fiercely protective of his brother, but also strives to toughen him up, allowing Michael to face - and often fail at - challenges. We know from the novel’s outset that Francis is dead, but when Chariandy finally reveals the circumstances, the event comes with both a sense of surprise and inevitability.įrancis, seen through Michael’s eyes, is a difficult character. But he has Francis to protect and guide him, for better or worse, until Francis is killed in a scene that comes blazing into focus only an instant before the death actually occurs. The narrator is Michael, who we meet at various points in his childhood and adolescence via the character’s memories, and as a young adult in the main narrative thread, which takes place in 1991, a decade after the death of his older brother Francis.įrom the beginning, Michael feels too fragile for the tough community he is forced to make his way in. Into this setting Chariandy introduces a cast of characters strikingly complete despite being minimally drawn. It’s a bleak place, and Chariandy does an excellent job evoking the concrete landscape, but offering occasional respite for both his characters and the reader in the lush greenery of the nearby Rouge Valley. Instead, the Park, the downtrodden east-end neighbourhood in which the main characters live, is presented as a harsh climate dominated by crumbling apartment towers, rundown townhouse complexes, scabby strip malls and underserved bus routes (the area wasn’t nicknamed “Scarberia” for nothing). The Toronto suburb (which was swallowed up by the Greater Toronto Area megacity with amalgamation in 1998) of Chariandy’s conjuring is a far cry from the bucolic ideal of sleepy bedroom communities replete with quiet cul-de-sacs and wide front lawns.

Since then, the Toronto-raised author has been teaching at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and working on his sophomore effort, the highly buzzed-about novel Brother.Ĭhariandy returns to a familiar time and place for Brother: Scarborough in the early 1990s, scene of his own adolescence.

It’s been 10 years since David Chariandy’s debut novel, Soucouyant, charmed literary award juries across Canada (and beyond - in addition to being shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize among many others, the book also made the longlist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award).

Brother chariandy