Last Night in Montreal
I cried so hard at the ending of this book that my muscles were spasming so… reader beware.
Last Night in Montreal is Emily St. John Mandel’s literary fiction approach to a mystery. While the “what happened” and “why” drive the plot, the lasting impact of the novel is the characters, their relationships, and their unique motivations. As Booklist put it, “The lost souls in this elegantly compelling novel are lost to themselves as much as they are to others.”
On a cold, snowy night when Lilia was young (~6), her father snuck her away from her mother’s home and the two of them spent the following years traveling from town to town, changing names and identities in each location.
“Later she could never remember why they had started driving away from everything, and at first her father was rendered in the broadest possible strokes: the hand passing her a styrofoam cup of hot chocolate in he gas station parking lot, the voice soothing her in a motel room as he cut of all her hair and dyed it, but mostly as a silhouette in the driver’s seat[…] He’d tell her anything about everything, except Before[…] Before was shorthand for the time before he started driving away with her, Before was a front lawn somewhere far to the north. More specifically, Before was her mother.”
This mystery alters the lives of her half-brother, a detective and his family, and the many people Lilia has left behind. While Lilia doesn’t know why she left, she knows she doesn’t want to stop leaving – that is until she meets Eli in New York City and finds that he and the city are harder to shake off than all the others. “‘What I want,’ she said quietly on the third night he spent with her, ‘is to stop traveling and stay in one place for a while. I’m starting to think I’ve been traveling too much.’” Despite this urge, Lilia disappears from Eli’s apartment one day without notice. When Eli receives a mysterious note from Michaela in Montreal, he treks to Canada to try and find Lilia or at least answers and confirmation that she’s ok. Michaela is an enigmatic woman who holds the secrets behind Lilia’s Before (and now), but she’s not . In Montreal, Eli, Lilia, and Michaela grapple with what it means to travel, the ways family can impact you for better or worse, and how to move forward instead of just moving on.
I think this book is beautifully written and the questions kept me engaged until the very end. My only criticism is that I might have liked a bit more character development throughout the book. That’s not to say the characters are flat - they are deep and interesting and complex. It just felt that sometimes the reveal of their complexity could have been more drawn out. If my only complaint about a book is that I wish it was longer, I think that’s a pretty good sign.
“I want to be your dictionary. I want to be your map. I wish, I wish I knew where you are tonight.”
Interested in more Emily St. John Mandel? Read my review of Station Eleven