When Toronto stands in for Monument Valley

Writer turns Allan Gardens into a landscape teeming with potential peril

“So this is where God put the West” said John Wayne when he first saw the lunar expanse of Arizona’s Monument Valley; in the films that he would go on to make with the director John Ford, the actor cast a shadow as long and hard as any of the sandstone buttes that give the region its unmistakable topography.

As a sun-baked and spacious playground for American heroes from The Duke to the Lone Ranger to Wile E. Coyote, Monument Valley is among the most recognizable cinematic locations in history. There’s thus something audacious about the way Toronto author Aaron Tucker plays with the area’s iconography — and underlying ideology — in his fine new novel “Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys,” which is set not in the Old West but the east end of Toronto, around Filmores Hotel and Allan Garden, a stretch that Tucker skilfully reconfigures into a treacherous and blasted landscape teeming with potential peril.

In the first half of the story, a man and a woman — once lovers, now friends, with resurfacing hints of mutual attraction — have a long, boozy conversation about Wayne and Ford’s Monumental western “The Searchers,” which concerns a hard-edged Confederate veteran named Ethan Edwards trying to locate his kidnapped niece in the aftermath of a Comanche raid. In the second, a series of unexpected and terrifying events compel our male protagonist — whose memories of the movie, as well as the night with his ex, are foggy — to re-enact aspects of the film’s narrative in real life and on home turf, which starts blurring together dangerously with psychic terrain.

If this latter section recalls “Taxi Driver” as much as “The Searchers,” that’s because Martin Scorsese always saw his urban-vigilante story as a spiritual remake of Ford’s film (there are also echoes in everything from “Jaws” to “Star Wars” to “Breaking Bad.”

“The challenge became how to make the two halves talk to each other,” says Tucker, who wrote the virtuoso, hallucinatory prose of the second part first.

“What finally brought it all together was COVID — I wrote the last 10 pages during the early weeks in March when there was all the chaos and uncertainty, again by walking through my neighbourhood to Yonge-Dundas and back. It was a catastrophe, and writing, then editing, from that space forced the description and the travelogue to carry more urgency, even when the physical geography of the book — a single apartment and then a dozen blocks — is actually quite contained.”

Like Andrew Sullivan’s recent thriller “The Marigold,” which imagined Toronto in the throes of ecological catastrophe, “Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys” allows the city to play itself; Tucker, who grew up in British Columbia, explains that he wanted to do his adopted neighbourhood of Moss Park poetic justice through his prose.

“It’s a very authentic and specific area of Toronto that deserves granular attention,” he says.

“In some ways, my love of the neighbourhood is built from my previous collection of poetry, “Catalogue d’oiseaux,” which also walks through part of the area, including Cabbagetown. I wanted to capture some of the violence and menace, and part of that was the gentrification, the giant machines and cranes, noisy and spewing dust and rocks all over. When I took photos along Dundas Street East, the background was cluttered with other construction sites, the skyline crossed with them, and I was thinking of the new condos going up, the massive buildings filling the sky, and wanted to contrast that with a very detailed street level version of the city.”

The idea of a civilization — and a character — caught between the past and the future is central to the western genre, and Tucker proves to be an adept theorist and critic even as he filters his observations through fiction. The long discussion about “The Searchers” that opens the book serves both as a detailed paraphrase of a classic (the film came in at No. 15 on the British Film Institute’s recent decennial poll of the greatest movies of all time) and a complex meditation on how its story plays in different ways to different viewers — the mix of obsession, devotion and ambivalence that goes into understanding a problematic masterpiece.

Ford’s tale of a man driven and consumed by obsession is stirring and unsentimental; it’s also reactionary and racist in ways that don’t so much belie its power as consolidate it.

“I wanted to really understand how a film like “The Searchers” lives in the contemporary moment,” Tucker says. “In 2017, it seemed like the figure of Ethan Edwards, and John Wayne for that matter, turned from a self-proclaimed right wing believer in white supremacy into a martyr for the creation of America … suddenly, Ethan was a nation builder, unjustly cast out into the desert.

“More than ever in my life, it seemed like the Ethan Edwardses of the world were being accepted and grouping together, not being cast out.”

The rising tide of white male grievance inflects the narrative of “Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys,” which channels a number of present-tense anxieties (including a startling twist that shifts the generic framework from the western towards something more science-fictional) while maintaining a thoughtful historical perspective. “I grew up being taught to romanticize certain parts of the frontier, and the settling of the West,” he says. “I learned no Indigenous history: who were the nations and people still living (here), what their language was. I learned about the establishment of churches and schools, but not residential schools, despite one being located in Kamloops, a city I went to often with my family as it was less than two hours away.”

In the book, Tucker exhumes and examines the racial politics of “The Searchers” in a way that feels organic to his central situation; he gives the film its due in shaping (and perhaps warping) the perspective of global audiences towards Indigenous characters while suggesting this disfigurement is part of a larger tradition of mythification that’s even more pervasive than Ford’s spacious widescreen frames.

“As I’ve gotten older, I have started to understand more about myself, how my understanding of white masculinity has been shaped by John Wayne, and really reckon with that,” Tucker says.

“‘Reckon’ is a word I find myself using a lot when describing this book. (Reckoning) with my own history, and my own implication in that history of barbarities and patterns of conquest … the levels of violence, and in particular male violence, and how those echo forward, perhaps via film or through embodied memories, are core to the book.”