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Taylor Builds His House

Story House blends architecture, counterfeiting and boxing to tell us about ourselves. Part two of a two-part interview.

By Matthew Mallon 16 Jun 2006 | TheTyee.ca

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SECOND OF TWO PARTS Timothy Taylor's new book, Story House, takes on architecture, boxing, and the search for authenticity. Like his first novel, the bestselling, food-centric Stanley Park, it has much to say about modern Vancouver. In the first part of this interview he discussed the anxieties of the second novel, his relationship, or lack of one, with contemporary foodie culture, and why he gets inspiration from Vancouver, despite and perhaps because of its deep disconnect with its past. In this final instalment, he talks about the genesis of the new book, learning to love the city's architecture, brand-hacking and the freight-carrying capacity of sport.

Matthew Mallon: So let's talk about your brand new modern contemporary Vancouver book. Some reviewers have said that while food was the central "trope" of Stanley Park, architecture is the central "trope" of Story House.

Timothy Taylor: Yes and no. It's undeniable that I get burning on certain things. Yeah, I get interested in something and I want to explore these areas through the lives of characters. So to that extent there is great similarity between food and architecture in terms of their functions in the books. The critical difference lies in the way I attempted to understand the two.

Food was something I was an enthusiast about. I was a practitioner, if you want to think of it that way. I was a consumer. I have no such relationship with architecture, despite the fact that I told my mother I wanted to be an architect when I was three years old, apparently. Despite that, I was not an architectural magazine buyer. I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the phenomenon of interior decorating. It's never really been an area of natural enthusiasm.

What did really interest me about architecture was something about the way the profession thinks about itself. And this is quite unlike food, because chefs are much more free-spirited about their work -- though I'm sure there are some seriously egg-heady guys -- but for the most part chefs are a pretty buccaneering lot. Architects think with grave seriousness about their undertaking. And there's always this sense of truth and falsehood in architecture, which I find fascinating, and also, there are comic elements to it.

Absolutely.

In some ways, I was more reverential of food than of architecture. Although the flip side was that I was sufficiently respectful of architects that I didn't try to get too far into the technical side of the profession. I realized it's way more complicated than food, from a technical standpoint. So really I just focused on trying to make my architects sound like architects.

Architecture in Vancouver is such an endlessly controversial subject.

We have a lot of bad architecture.

We mostly have bad architecture.

Trying to think like an architect, which meant mostly trying to look at stuff and be opinionated, I discovered a lot of nice stuff in Vancouver that I never would have thought was particularly nice before. I love the Post Office now, and I love the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. I can look at buildings that are not even particularly good examples of what they are and you can sort of see the architectural idea. And I find that I can kind of enjoy them more. The Mac Blo building [by Arthur Erickson] -- I know that most people who know anything about architecture are able to appreciate it. But I've struggled with that building for years. But it is neat that in Vancouver we have architecture from all the eras.

We'll see how much survives this latest boom. William Gibson recently told me that he thought Vancouver had been lucky not to have gone through the '70s boom that Toronto did because, as he put it, Toronto got stuck with this concrete version of a permanent big, wide '70s tie.

And to jump forward, I am glad that we don't have so much money slushing around that we, like every other place on earth, end up with a [Daniel] Libeskind and a [Frank] Gehry. Why don't we just skip them? Why don't we just not have a Libeskind and a Gehry? Why don't we just continue in our hodgepodge investment in every architectural idea that comes along? It makes the city interesting to read.

But there's much more to Story House than architecture. There's the life-long fight between the two brothers that starts with the opening boxing match, there's the inquiry into authenticity...

There are three main areas of inquiry that overlay one another. But they all start really with conflict. I knew from the very earliest days of this novel that I was going to be exploring some sort of building/architectural project, because I wanted to talk about architectural ideas. I wanted somebody to have big architectural ideas -- mistaken or otherwise. And I knew that that project was going to be all messed up and there was going to be conflict.

Originally, I had two adults boxing, resolving a dispute that stemmed from some project they were working on together. The evolution of it was that first the two guys became boys, and then they became brothers and then half-brothers and then things started to acquire their shape. You have this remembered conflict that lives and flourishes into their adult lives, even though they don't really see much of one another.

Explain your attraction to boxing.

Sports in general have a tremendous storytelling capacity. This is human nature and it stems more from the viewer than it does from the participant. We watch a sporting event and it gives emblem to conflict and struggle. We feel that a sporting event gives life to a host of stories that often depend on the kinds of things that we happen to be processing in our own lives at that point.

So, David and Goliath stories, the turning over of old order stories, you name 'em. Sporting events in general have this freight-carrying capacity. We fill them up with significance. It's an age-old thing. It was an emblem for something else, a way for us to explore other things. Boxing is all of that, but to a fantastically greater degree. And that's why George Foreman once famously said it was the sport to which all other sports aspire.

Basically every sport is about conflict but boxing actually is conflict. Boxing allows identification with the participants in a really spectacular way. It is impossible, in my experience, to watch any boxing match, good, bad, important, unimportant, rookies or long-time veterans, watch every one of them and you will find yourself involved in some -- not necessarily pleasant -- identification with these guys. A sympathy, an empathy, a horror on their behalf. So it grips you in a way that I've just simply never found with other sports. It truly is the ultra sport. And that's always how it held me: its storytelling capacity and its ability to grip.

My only connection with it is through mutual acquaintances of ours -- characters like the boxer/stand-up comic Brad McPeake. And their fascination, for me, is how much they seem to be from a different era.

They seem actively engaged with the past, yes. They're anachronistic. It's an anachronistic sport. The fact that I box politely in this gym downtown with a lawyer that I've known for years does not make me a boxer. McPeake was a fighter. Totally different. His engagement with the sport is completely different than my own.

I'm an enthusiast outsider geek interested in boxers, and the fact that I might pull on gloves and do a little sparring has no bearing in some respects on this discussion. I'm not saying this out of some false humility. It also serves to explain my fascination with it. I'm fascinated with the way people watch boxing. I'm fascinated in how spectators engage with it. I'm very interested in the experience of fighters too, but that's not what I'm trying to explore in the book. Cooler writers than me would probably avoid it altogether.

When you began writing the book, did you begin with the boxing match?

I did, actually. It was the very first thing I wrote, although it was quite different than what played, because originally they were adults, and settling a dispute. I couldn't have even told you at that time if they were builders or just putting up a house, or architects or partners in a firm or what they were. But that use of boxing as a way of giving a sharp and hopefully exciting emblem of deeper-rooted personal conflict was an originating idea.

Then boxing in some ways fades out of it. It was a way of introducing this sort of primal conflict, a conflict that exists at the cellular level. These guys were born to lean against one another. And then that recedes as an active concern and their adult lives take shape. And then the two areas of great interest to me, which were "the great seeking of truth and falsehood in architecture" and the manipulation of truth and falsehood in the whole realm of counterfeiting and brand name products. And that became the more important parallel.

Boxing is the thing on which their conflict is built. But it's important that the two brothers are doing the two things that they are doing.

Why parallel architecture with brand-name counterfeiting?

Architecture was there from the beginning. Counterfeiting was sort of given to me. I knew a guy who was involved in the trade, long before I started writing the book. I knew him, actually, during the early '90s, kind of at the end of the counterfeiting gold rush. And at that time, before Stanley Park was written, I found him just an absolutely riveting guy. Really just fascinating, and I'm not sure I would have been able to articulate why at the time.

"Hacking the brand" is a really compelling idea. I finally sat him down for an interview about his work -- a very nervous interview. That didn't happen until around 2002. I'd known him for about 10 years at that point. Then those two tropes, if you will, became the ones that dominantly concerned me.

The book feels very consciously structured, very consciously engaged with big ideas, in a way that makes it seem like -- and this is not a criticism -- a throwback novel, something from the mid-20th century.

I didn't try to do something that had a throwback quality. I definitely tried to do something that was "architected." I knew that the book was forming itself up with pretty obvious planks and beams and I knew that most readers would begin to read it that way. So the book can be looked at as having architectural elements. And maybe because I was just immersed in architectural ideas they were bleeding into the way that I thought about construction of the novel.

I can't really explain it. I didn't commit early to that idea. It did emerge from what I was working on. Then I realized that this was how the book was coming together and I never fought it. I never thought, "Oh my God, people are going to roll their eyes at this." I thought: "Oh, that's fine. That's the way this book wants to be."

Timothy Taylor is already at work on his next projects, a non-fiction book, followed by a third novel. Filming is expected to begin on the film version of Stanley Park next summer, a project headed by Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood.

 [Tyee]