| When he started writing Story House, Vancouver author Timothy Taylor had little more than an image – two young men in a boxing ring. He also knew that architecture was going to play a part in the story.
"In boxing and in architecture, there are always these great underlying truths," says Taylor. "At one point, I collected all the great truths of boxing – for example, ‘kill the body and the head will die.’" Both architecture and boxing, he points out, have a triangular "truth" at their centre. "The characters are influenced by a universe governed by great underlying truths and rules."
Story House (Random House, 464 pp.), Taylor’s second novel, tells the story of the two sons of Packer Gordon, a renowned modernist architect. Hating each other as kids, their father encourages them to take up boxing, which ends when one son knocks the other out. While one son, Graham, grows up to become an architect himself and carves out a niche redesigning hotels and other buildings, his illegitimate older brother, Elliot, hangs out on the Vancouver punk scene and ultimately becomes successful in the business of selling fake watches and other counterfeit merchandise. Graham’s wife has left him, while Elliot, estranged from his brother, has just recently started a family. Avi Zweigler, a TV producer and Packer Gordon aficionado, enlists both Graham and Elliot to restore a forgotten, decaying building built by their father in Vancouver’s East Side, intending to film the process and create a reality TV show.
Taylor has had a varied career, working as a banker before turning to writing full-time. He has written short stories and two novels, and worked as a journalist and in film. However, despite the role that architecture plays in the novel, Taylor admits that he has no formal background in the field.
"(Architecture) surrounds us, but it exists in a strangely invisible way to most people," he says. "It is something that originated as an idea that we live with." Taylor’s knowledge of architecture largely comes from personal interest, but still allows him to vividly describe some of the fictional buildings in the novel, and he readily lists off a number of architects on whose work he based the style of Packer Gordon. Taylor’s characters also draw on aboriginal architecture, with both Gordon and Graham visiting the remains of Kiusta, a 19th century Haida village.
Much like the fluid melding of building with setting that Taylor describes as a hallmark of his fictional architect’s style, Story House moves effortlessly back and forth in time, simultaneously describing Graham’s and Elliot’s lives in the present, while filling in the details of their past and describing the many years of their estrangement. Taylor, however, says that the structure of this shifting between present and past wasn’t planned.
"I tried to capture the simultaneity of the present and the past," he says, describing architecture as metaphor. "Buildings evolve over time. They are both what the architect intended them to be and what they have become."
Taylor’s style is also immediately noticeable, with well-textured sentences describing scenes, buildings and even the nouveau cuisine at Graham’s favourite restaurant.
"I think it was Orwell who said that as soon as you know your own style, you’re dead," says Taylor. He claims that his style and sentence structure are not deliberate. "I go for sound. I know the sound that I want the piece to create… the mechanics of the sentence emerge from that."
Taylor is relatively candid about his creative process when it comes to creating characters, too, saying that they are fleshed out over the course of a book.
"I often start with a picture, clipped from a magazine," he says. "I had pictures of Graham and Elliot for a long time." In the case of Story House, the unseen Packer Gordon, who has died before the novel begins, also heavily influences the central characters.
"With Graham and Elliot, I learned about each character through the other," says Taylor, adding that the characters are effectively asking each other ‘who is the real son?’ He admits that Packer Gordon was himself a fully realized character, but that he chose to keep him off-scene as his personality traits emerge in his children.
"There are some qualities you are proud to inherit, others you aren’t, and some that you wish you had inherited," says Taylor. |
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