Review | Catastrophe, connection and the power of words: Tomas Hachard’s debut novel ‘City In Flames’

A near-future City Hall meeting, raucous and thrumming with barely suppressed violence, opens “City in Flames.” Tomas Hachard’s superb debut novel then unfolds in non-linear fashion over a three-year period, leaping back and forth in time over its fault line, “the day of the fires.” But the setting and events are almost immaterial, mere raw material for the sounds and meanings that connect us to one another in a story about the power of words.

Supple in its construction, the novel is as silent as it can be about time, place, and names. The city is Toronto, with its lake to the south and “endless suburbia” to the north, but Hachard calls it Hillside, possibly in tribute to the number of people who die on it. The climate-change disasters that kickstart the political catastrophe, from floods to wildfires, are as off-stage as the deaths that eventually ensue. The populist leader, who rides his City Hall speech to national power before turning on his own followers, is known only as P. The protagonists — star-crossed lovers doesn’t begin to describe them — are simply Sara and Kevin. What matters are the words they exchange, and their silences, the many times Hachard notes, “Connection failed.”

Hillside native Sara is a listless and unhappy grad student in the UK when she notices a new message on her dating app, this one from equally apathetic IT employee Kevin in Hillside. It’s three days of extended text exchanges before they realize there’s an ocean between them, a time lag Sara is grateful for. If they had known the distance immediately, they would have immediately moved on. Now their words have connected them.

As P and his government turn ever more authoritarian, repression and resistance build upon each other until a literal conflagration erupts. Sara, far from the danger zone, urges a more defiant response while questioning her readiness to send other people to the front lines; Kevin, on the spot, is far more tentative, and very aware of his own fear when facing a choice.

Minor characters chime in, some captivated by others’ ability to articulate their resentments, some finding all speech to be empty words. “We used to fight bad stories with better stories,” laments a professor. “Now people think they’re past that.” And, in a perfect counterpoint, Kevin finds himself calculating — from a sixth-floor vantage point — the potential threat offered by four strangers he cannot hear. All along the way, readers wait to see if the would-be couple — poised between desire for commitment and fear of it — ever meet in person. After the fires rage, the electrical grid collapses and trans-Atlantic texting goes black. Connection failed.

It all works with a wonderful resonance in a novel as thought-provoking as it is emotionally moving. In a love story without touch, that first and greatest of human senses, words are indeed all that matter.

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