Her last novel, Angel Walk (1996), was set against Second World War scenery. Flash further back, to 1987 and the novel Between Men, and there was Calgary circa 1889. Sharp interviewers sniffed something: did this mean that Katherine Govier was some kind of – well, historical novelist? “I’m sort of a frustrated historian,” the witness was quick enough to confess. And yet: “I don’t want to write novels that happen all in the past. I’m very interested in what’s happening today. It’s just that when I look at what’s happening today, I always want to see what’s behind that.”


Any surprise that, back here in the present, Govier’s new novel works in the now and the then? None. What’s new, perhaps, is that in The Truth Teller, past and present often seem to be active on the same plane. Govier’s sixth novel is the story of four central characters, each of whom, in their way, comes of age. It’s also about the characters’ common ground, Toronto’s Manor School for Classical Studies.

Dr. Dugald Laird and his wife, Francesca, run the place on the idea that by exposing – no, more: immersing – their students in the learning of the Greeks and Romans and the Renaissance, they’re doing nothing less than saving their lives. Case in point: the awkward new girl, Cassie, whom Francesca quickly dubs Cassandra, after Priam’s daughter in Greek legend, she who can see into the future, but whose reports of what’s coming are doomed never to be believed. In The Truth Teller, Cassie proceeds to become her nickname – a late 20th-century, Torontonian Cassandra.

“The telescoping of time, that’s something that I find quite fascinating as a writer,” Govier was saying one winter day over tea in a Toronto restaurant. “History and future, you get to conflate. You get to float back in people’s lives, float forward, mix it all up.

“Also, if you look at my work, I’ve written a lot about artists of various kinds. Photographers, dancers, people who put stories together. It’s not that the whole world is fascinated by these particular professions, that’s not why I’m doing it, it’s more that everyone alive is really an artist of their own existence. There’s the story they tell themselves. I’m always looking at that process – that you make yourself, you make your story. And you tell it to yourself.”

Govier borrows from Francesca to describe the way a novel begins for her. “It’s like she says – you get ‘an agitation that won’t go away.’ For this book, it was a combination of things. When I started, about three years ago, I was fascinated by the kind of lifelong partnership between a man and a woman like Dugald and Francesca that makes them almost one creature. The marriage was something I’ve thought about for a long, long time. I don’t know why. My parents are about to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary, that may be one thing. And I’ve always regarded that [permanence] as an astonishing thing. It’s like a monument in itself.”

A second agitation was teenagers. “I have two of them. And I spend quite a bit of time with them and their friends. I was interested especially by the way that, girls in particular – they feel they’re junk. They’re treated like junk and they act like junk. That was something I wanted to explore.”

That meant research. Unlike her approach to Angel Walk, where she worked a way into the culture of the Second World War mostly through books, for The Truth Teller she went to the source. It so happened that when she was a month into her writing, an editor at Toronto Life called to ask if she’d write an article about troubled – and troublesome – teenaged girls.

“I was astonished when I got the call, because I was embarking on this book. I did the article, in a very deliberate, journalistic way, meeting with three or four of these girls with these extended, horrific stories of being kicked out, living on the street, going back home, beating up their mom, going to court – all of that.”

Closer to home, she called on her son, Robin, and one of his friends. “They were my dialect consultants. I thank them in the book, they’re very pleased. The funny part about that was, I asked them all this stuff about a year or so ago. Then I got the page-proofs and had to go back over them. So I sat down with them last week and they’re telling me, ‘Oh, my god, nobody says that now.’ Oh, they howled. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘you’re so cute.’ For me, all that matters is that it sounds like it’s the teenagers’ language in the novel. I just didn’t want it to sound like the sixties or the seventies.”

Divided into three books, The Truth Teller is also divided in its geography. The middle section turns on an eventful school trip to Greece. First and finally, though, there’s Toronto.

“Most of my books have a very strong geography,” says Govier, who, while she’s lived in Toronto for 20 years, was born in Edmonton and raised in Calgary. “Between Men was the first book where I really tried a kind of excavation of a place. It felt easy to me. Western history is really accessible.

“Writing fiction is really difficult if you don’t understand the society of a place. Growing up in Calgary, I know who the people are, I have a sense of what they do when they go home, what their parents might have done.

“Toronto was a bit of a mystery to me when I came here, so I didn’t feel confident when I came here to do that kind of excavation. Even with Hearts of Flame [1991], which was a Toronto book, the people came from Alberta. They were all Westerners.”

In The Truth Teller, Manor School is in Wychwood Park, “a romantic suburb within the vastness of Toronto,” as Dugald rhapsodizes. He has roots here: a hundred years ago, his uncle founded the school. But Dugald talks as if he’s lived here forever – as if the waters of Taddle Creek, the buried water course that lies buried deep beneath the school, also run through his veins. Govier acknowledges that this book more than any of her others is “a Toronto book,” one in which she’s tried to map the city and its people, their histories, their myths.

The Truth Teller also marks Govier’s debut as a Random House author. She was with Penguin and then Little, Brown. When the latter closed its doors in 1998, the move was quick and, she says, natural, coinciding as it did with the appointment of Anne Collins as Random House Canada’s editorial director. In 1971 – long before they’d worked together at Toronto Life (Collins was the editor who’d assigned that troubled teenager story) – the two were students together at York University.

“She was a really big part of this process,” Govier says. “I have never worked so closely with an editor.” Collins wanted to see the first draft of the book, something that Govier had in the past kept to herself. “She ended up reading five drafts,” Govier says. “She made terrific comments all the way through. She didn’t do line edits, she gave me ideas, helped me shape it. She made about three remarks over the course of the editing that saved me months.

“It’s the kind of relationship you read about, but I don’t think it exists much in Canadian publishing. I mean, with the last round of changes, the book was in galleys, it had already been copy-edited – Anne was sitting there at the computer inputting the changes herself. That’s really devotion.”

(The devotion at the company level also looks to be long-term: via its Vintage imprint, Random House is publishing three titles from Govier’s backlist this spring.)

Ten years back in her own past, Govier told an interviewer that as a young writer, she tended to write “more sincerely,” out of “pain and feelings,” but as she grew older the feelings were “moderated by world knowledge.”

Today, when she looks at some of her earlier books, she says, “Yes, they do astonish me, that I wrote them. There’s a voice in there, it seems very sure of itself – and I don’t remember having it. It’s not a total stranger. It’s someone, we might have a lot in common. But it doesn’t seem quite my own.

“As a younger person I was quite overwhelmed by my feelings, and the feelings of everyone else. In that scary, unformed way, kind of like Cassie. Like a mushroom that’s just leaped out of the ground – everything will bruise, everything has an impact. I think as I’ve gone along I’ve become more interested in ideas. More interested in bigger spaces.

“The image I would use is rooms. As you continue to write – mature from a younger writer into mid-career, or whatever – you walk through a series of rooms. Your first novel is a small room. The rooms get slightly bigger each time. I feel I’m in quite a large room, now. In other words, there are many things I can try. I’m not afraid, I can reach further. It’s exciting.”

Having surrendered The Truth Teller to publisher and, soon, public, Govier says she’s already working on another novel – “another agitation that wouldn’t go away.”

“It really is the best thing to do,” she says. “There’s all this time once you’ve finished a book and you’re waiting for it to come out, there are the nerves about how it’s going to go, and a sense of loss. And, you know, at this stage, it’s the first time you really figure out what the novel is, somehow – and then it’s gone. It’s like teenagers: ‘Oh, that’s who you were.’”