It turns out Pierre was a combatant in the Lebanese Civil War and did things that caused the violent deaths of innocents. It’s the kind of place that lures in characters that, in another time, might have inhabited Rick’s Café in Casablanca. The young man, who is a budding journalist working for a TV station in Toronto (read CBC here), makes his way to a place that his father had frequented, a small bar hidden away in the big city, where a mysterious, somewhat sinister man named Ari may hold the truth in his hands. After the father is killed in violent and mysterious circumstances, Cyril sets out to find out more about his father and why he died the way he did. The Only Café tells the story of Pierre Cormier and his son Cyril, who are estranged from each other by failed marriages and the father’s secrecy. They think, ‘Now I’m never going to know.’ It is a painful thing for a young person to grow up not knowing who or what caused their estrangement.” “There is a kind of hopelessness that falls over the survivor. Soon MacIntyre was musing about what might happen when a parent with secrets disappears. And how secrets will sometimes cause rifts between the generations between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.” “I had an idea about memory, violence, shame, embarrassment and secrets. I have done it in various shades and shapes,” he said in a phone interview from his hotel room in Winnipeg before his appearance at the Ottawa International Writers Festival on Monday. “I had an idea and I have had this idea for a long time about the consequences of violence. It forms the basis for his new novel, The Only Café. For the former CBC-TV journalist Linden MacIntyre, his time spent in Lebanon covering the brutal civil war in the 1980s is such a memory. There are things that mark you … that fester in your memory until one day they just have to come out.
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