October 14, 2022
Finding Edward, by Sheila Murray
After hearing great things about Sheila Murray’s novel Finding Edward, I finally picked it up last weekend to discover it lives up to the praise of critics like Donna Bailey Nurse (who’s written, “This beautiful necessary novel will become a touchstone.”)
And then this week, it was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award!
Though it took a bit of time for all its pieces to come together for me, a book that starts off kind of quiet, which is fitting seeing as its protagonist, Cyril, is quiet, understated, someone you might not even notice if you passed him on the street.
Cyril, just 21, raised by his mother in Jamaica after his white English father leaves their family, is left alone after his mother dies, but he has an inheritance from a benefactor, his mother’s former employer, who’d encouraged him to pursue an education, and Cyril decides to finally take this advice and travels to Canada to enroll at then-Ryerson University (the novel is set in 2012), but being in Canada, and being Black in Canada, turns out to be far more complicated and fraught than he’d expected. His understanding of situation is deepened after he finds photographs and documents from the 1920s pertaining to a mixed race child called Edward, and begins archival research to determine Edward’s identity, thereby weaving in key (and under-celebrated) elements of Canadian Black history including Thornton Blackburn, who started Toronto’s first taxi company in the 1850s; Mary-Ann Shadd, the first Black newspaper publisher in Canada; the story of Nova Scotia’s Africville community; the experiences of Black railway porters (which is also portrayed in the Giller-nominated novel The Sleeping Car Porter, by Suzette Mayr); and more.
At the same time, Cyril’s violent encounters with police and precarious situation with work, housing, school and finances (he’s helping to support his two siblings back in Jamaica) are reflective how little has changed over the years, all this bringing him into contact with local Black activists who help him to imagine possibilities for a different kind of Black future.
Just a satisfying literary experience, plus a rich portrayal of Black experience in Toronto and beyond.
