In the Skin of a Lion

“She [the nun] leaned forward earnestly and looked at him [Nicholas], searching out his face now. Words just on the far side of her skin, about to fall out. Wanting to know his name which he had forgotten to tell her.” 

Throughout the traumatic episode in which Nicholas rescues the nun (Alice) in midair after she was blown off the bridge, Alice does not utter a word. This moment, in which Alice wishes to break her silence and connect with Nicholas but ultimately cannot, encapsulates several of the novel’s important themes and motifs: verbal versus nonverbal communication, skin as a barrier around identity or an obstacle to human connection, and the humanizing power of names. Throughout the novel, Alice becomes increasingly verbal, extroverted, embodied, and confident, but this first scene with Nicholas offers a striking portrait of her initial timidity.

“North America is still without language, gestures and work and bloodlines are the only currency.” 

This quotation from the chapter about Nicholas and the Bloor Street Viaduct provides a pithy summary of one of the novel’s most important themes: Language gives people the opportunity to individuate, and without it they are reducible to demographics like ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and occupation. Nicholas’s immigrant identity and his skills as a physical laborer define him in his society because he is an immigrant who speaks limited English and therefore cannot distinguish himself through language.

“Either he owned people or they were his enemies. No compatriots. No prisoners. In the tenth century, he liked to say, the price of a greyhound or a hawk was the same as that for a man.” 

Ambrose, the tycoon who looms myth-like throughout most of the novel, embodies the dehumanizing spirit of capitalism. This quotation reveals the way in which capitalism promotes such radical self-interest that its moguls can only view other human beings as property or threats to their wealth.

“Taking his [Patrick’s] pocket handkerchief, she [Clara] wet a corner with her tongue.

—You’ve got mud on you, she said, rubbing his forehead.

All these gestures removed place, country, everything. He felt he had come back to the world.” 

When Patrick, a working-class young man, first meets Clara, a glamorous actress and millionaire’s lover, the gulf between their socioeconomic statuses seems unbridgeable. But the physical touch that occurs in this episode breaks down the demographic barrier, creating intimacy and humanizing both characters. It touches on the novel’s pervasive motif of skin and flesh: Here, bodily touch causes Patrick and Clara to recognize and discover each other in their shared humanity, despite the difference in their social classes.

“Clara begins to laugh. She moans like a spirit looking for the keyhole out of the room. She places her hands on the frail walls, then her mouth explodes with noise and she tugs Alice out into the Ontario night. They crash down the wood steps, Clara’s growls unnaming things, their bodies rolling among the low moon flowers and grass and then leaping up as the rain breaks free of the locked heat clouds, running into the thunder of a dark field, through the stomach-high beans and corn, the damp rustle of it against their skirts and outstretched arms—the house fever slipping away from them.” 

In contrast to Alice in Chapter 2, who finds herself caught in silence, unable to access language, here Clara barrels past language and revels in the freedom of unrestricted noise. Not only does this passage highlight the differences in Clara and Alice’s personalities, it also touches on the theme of names. Elsewhere in the novel, names endow people and things with identity and individuality, but here, Clara finds liberty in “unnaming things”—finding newness and strangeness in what was once familiar. The destruction of order becomes joyful.

“Sometimes when he is alone, Patrick will blindfold himself and move around in a room, slowly at first, then faster until he is immaculate and magical in it. He will parade, turn suddenly away from lampshades, duck under hanging plants, even run across the room and leap in his darkness over small tables.” 

This passage foreshadows the novel’s final scene, in which Patrick invades the waterworks by swimming through its channels and breaking through its barriers in utter darkness. This scene explains how Patrick developed this extraordinary skill. Furthermore, it is a strong example of finding liberty in darkness.

“Patrick and the others walk silently, remembering the teeth of the animals distinct, that screaming, the feet bound so they wouldn’t slash out and break themselves, lowered forty feet down and remaining there until they died or the tunnel reached the selected mark under the lake. And when would that be? The brain of the mule no more and no less knowledgeable than the body of a man who dug into a clay wall in front of him.” 

This passage describes the working conditions of the laborers building the waterworks. It highlights the dehumanizing power of industry, which treats men as mules valued only for the strength of their bodies, disregarding their minds and spirits.

“His mind skates across old conversations. The past drifts into the air like an oasis and he watches himself within it.” 

This quotation, in which Patrick observes himself caught in remembrance, offers a meta-commentary on the novel’s narrative style: It is a bricolage of Patrick’s incomplete, nonlinear memories.

“In Kosta’s house he relaxes as Alice speaks with her friends, slipping out of English and into Finnish or Macedonian. She knows she can be unconcerned with his lack of language, that he is happy. She converses with full energy in this theatre of the dinner table, her face vivid; a scar, a mole will exaggerate when not disguised by the content of conversation. He in fact pleasures in his own descant interpretations of what is being said. He catches only the names of streets, the name of Police Chief Draper, who has imposed laws against public meetings by foreigners. So if they speak this way in public, in any language other than English, they will be jailed.” 

In addition to highlighting the contrast between Patrick’s taciturn nature and Alice’s hyper-verbal, polyglottal extroversion, this passage also reveals their different opinions on the purpose of language. Patrick feels he does not need language to assimilate into social groups, while Alice relies on her multilingualism to enter and move between social groups. The passage’s last two sentences emphasize language’s power to unite and strengthen minority groups—even to the point that those groups become so strong that they are perceived as threats to the majority.

“He [Patrick] knew nothing about the men around him except how they moved and laughed—on this side of language.” 

This short sentence reveals that the laborers—whose nationalities, ethnicities, and languages are disparate—find a sense of shared identity through physical gestures, since they cannot commune through speech.

“He lived—in his job and during these evening walks—in a silence, with noise and conversation all around him. To be understood, his reactions had to exaggerate themselves. The family idiot.” 

This passage reveals how others perceive Patrick due to his aversion to speech and conversation; his inability or unwillingness to communicate verbally renders him strange in his communities. Shared language forms and binds those communities, so Patrick’s silence makes him an outsider everywhere.

“He was always comfortable in someone else’s landscape, enjoyed being taught the customs of a place. Patrick wanted the city Hana had constructed for herself—the places she brought together and held as if on the delicate thread of curiosity.” 

Although Patrick is a native Canadian working in Canada, he paradoxically feels as foreign as any of his immigrant peers. This is in part due to his rural upbringing: He is not native to the city. This quotation, however, reveals that Patrick prefers to be a foreigner—prefers not to belong. He finds security in his outsider status and enjoys being a tourist in other people’s communities.

“The street-band had depicted perfect company, with an ending full of embraces after the solos had made everyone stronger, more delineated. His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web—all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a daredevil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an actress who ran away with a millionaire—the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned.” 

This passage could be regarded as the novel’s climax. It is the moment in which the seemingly unconnected swatches of plot narrated up to this point are finally revealed to belong to a continuous fabric. It also comments on the novel’s unique narrative style: Because each of these characters and vignettes first appeared separately and individually, their interconnectedness is all the more profound when it finally becomes apparent.

“The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’ Meander if you want to get to town.” 

This quotation offers a far more synoptic expression of the meta-commentary described above: The revelation of human and narrative interconnectedness is more precious when it is gradual, nonlinear, complex, and unexpected.

“Nicholas is aware of himself standing there within the pleasure of recall. It is something new to him. This is what history means. He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light. Energy poured through him. That was all he had time for in those years. Language, customs, family, salaries. Patrick’s gift, that arrow into the past, shows him the wealth in himself, how he has been sewn into history. Now he will begin to tell stories. He is a tentative man, even with his family. That night in bed shyly he tells his wife the story of the nun.” 

In this passage, Nicholas experiences a similar revelation to the one Patrick recently had regarding the power of uniting loose narrative threads. However, Nicholas is not drawing together others’ experiences but rather his own story. When Patrick reminds Nicholas of his experience with the nun (Alice) on the bridge, Nicholas is forced to narrate his own past, and through this act of narration, Nicholas feels that his loose memories are transformed into unified history. He feels empowered to conceive of his past as history, and he feels inspired to retell it to his family. This moment represents an important facet of the novel’s message about the power of storytelling.

“Alice had once described a play to him [Patrick] in which several actresses shared the role of the heroine. After half an hour the powerful matriarch removed her coat from which animal pelts dangled and she passed it, along with her strength, to one of the minor characters. In this way even a silent daughter could put on the cloak and be able to break through her chrysalis into language. Each person had their moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the story.” 

This passage encapsulates an important theme: the theater of identity and power. Skin is repeatedly emphasized as an important marker of identity, but this passage introduces the idea of skin as a costume that can endow its wearer with identity—and with power. This calls into question the authenticity of identity and power: If a coat is what makes a powerful matriarch powerful, then any individual who assumes that coat must also assume that power.

“Alice… He breathes out a dead name. Only a dead name is permanent.” 

Names endow people with identity, individuality, and status. They are, however, shown to be artificial (similar to the way skin is shown to be a superficial and changeable marker of identity), particularly through the revelation that “Alice” was a name the anonymous nun chose for herself when she shook off her previous identity and assumed a new one. This quotation reemphasizes the superficiality of names by implying that they are changeable, but it adds a caveat: Names become unchangeable at death.

“He would never leave his name where his skill had been.” 

Caravaggio’s character reveals another aspect of the names motif: Names give identity, which means that namelessness offers the freedom of anonymity. In this quotation, Caravaggio demonstrates the importance of anonymity to his work as a thief. Thieves who want to be known by name cannot ultimately be successful criminals. His genius as a thief depends on his namelessness.

—I have literally fallen in love with the lake. I dread the day I will have to leave it. Tonight I was writing the first love poem I have written in years and the lover was the sound of lakewater.

—I’ve always had a fear of water creatures.

—But water is benign…” 

This exchange between Anne and Caravaggio encapsulates water’s dual nature as a motif in the novel. In certain contexts and to certain characters, water is a source of refreshment and purification, yet in other contexts and to other characters it is a force of violence and destruction.

“In prison he had protected himself with silence—as if any sentence would be unsafe territory, as if saying even one word would begin a release of Alice out of his body. Secrecy kept him powerful. By refusing communication he could hold her within himself, in his arms.” 

This passage reveals that Patrick’s preference for silence over speech is not merely a comfort but also a self-protective measure. He fears that his memories and other emotional possessions might escape him through language, so he believes he can preserve them by holding himself in silence.

“[T]he rich, being able to change everything but their names and looks, would defend these characteristics with care.” 

This quotation adds a layer of complexity to the motif of names. The rich owe their wealth to their names, either because they belong to wealthy families, because they are celebrities, or because it is impossible to accrue property without a name (consider the phrase “he has X dollars to his name”). One cannot belong to the wealthy class without a name. The wealthy, therefore, do not have the freedom to change their names. Wary of the significance and unchangeability of their names, the wealthy cling to and protect those names fiercely.

“We need excess, something to live up to. I fought tooth and nail for that herringbone.” 

This line, spoken by Commissioner Harris, is a crisp expression of the bourgeoisie attitude, according to the novel. These captains of capitalism (embodied in Harris) regard opulence as aspirational. Lavishness is evidence of the success of capitalism as well as inspiration to further its vision.

“You must realize you are like these places, Patrick. You’re as much of the fabric as the aldermen and the millionaires. But you’re among the dwarfs of enterprise who never get accepted or acknowledged. Mongrel company. You’re a lost heir. So you stay in the woods. You reject power. And this is how the bland fools—the politicians and press and mayors and their advisers—become spokesmen for the age. You must realize the trick is to be as serious when you are old as when you are young.” 

This quotation from Harris combines two important themes: the interconnectedness of all classes of human beings and the superficiality of power. Harris wants Patrick to recognize that he is not an enemy outsider to this industry but rather a crucial member of it. Furthermore, he acknowledges that those in power (implicitly including himself among that number) did not achieve their status on merit and that Patrick might be equally deserving of that power had he not exiled himself to the lower class.