The contemporary urban experience is not a subject that dominates Canadian fiction. A quick scan of the bestseller lists and awards shortlists of recent years reveals the firm dominance of novels set in the past, or in rural settings. There are exceptions, of course, but on the whole, the urban experience has escaped the notice of most major Canadian fiction writers, editors, and maybe even readers.

Maggie Helwig, a politically engaged writer whose previous novel, Between Mountains, was set in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Balkan wars, locates her new novel in a precisely described Toronto in the year 2002. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington are still fresh in the minds of the city’s denizens, fomenting a mass paranoia that manifests itself in vague, unspecified fears about men in turbans piloting bicycles with plastic bags hanging from the handlebars: “If you were frightened enough, they could look like something else, those bags. Bulky packages, brown paper with grease stains. It could be groceries. It could be terror.”

When an unnamed high school student collapses on a subway after smelling something “like roses,” panic ensues, the entire city beginning to fear that it is under attack. “Somebody put a poison gas on the train” is the immediate assumption of one of the sick girl’s friends. Even after the hazmat team arrives in white decontamination suits and declares the scene clear, the indefinite fears of the populace refuse to dissipate.

The fear of airborne contagion, coupled with images of mass transit commuters clad in sterile hospital masks and the instinctive avoidance of any stranger who appears even mildly ill, is starkly reminiscent of the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto. Helwig clearly intends her readers to make this association. Echoes of the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway also pervade the novel. Helwig is adept at capturing the peculiar post-9/11 psyche that admits a kind of pervasive paranoia about the urban environment, which can suddenly seem a seething cauldron of threat and danger without reason or basis. (“How many people in the street were carrying their own terrorists in their heads, and what shape did they take?”)

This urban paranoia, fostered by increasing numbers of people succumbing to the mystery illness, forms the background for a love story between Alex, a diabetic operating room photographer, and Suzanne, a woman with whom he had a brief affair before she summarily relocated to Vancouver without so much as a goodbye. When Suzanne resurfaces in his life and asks for help in dealing with her schizophrenic brother Derek, Alex is forced to confront his unresolved feelings for her.

Foregrounding the love story is a way for Helwig to give a human face to the terror of the city’s residents, and she works hard to underscore the connections between the specific and the general in this regard. Alex is a witness to the first girl’s collapse on the subway, and is himself suffering from proliferative retinopathy, a degenerative ocular condition associated with his diabetes. Helwig makes explicit the connection between the personal and the public in a scene describing the operation Alex undergoes to try to quell bleeding in his eyes. As he sits “with his head in a box” while lasers attack his eyes, “the rest of the world went on, planes fell out of the air and diseases were quarantined.”

Helwig shuffles between the narrow focus of the love story and the broader scope of the city’s plight, like a camera operator zooming in and out. This strategy pays dividends, but there is no escaping the essentially melodramatic nature of the personal story, and the soap-opera tone of some of the novel’s scenes, particularly those featuring Derek. In particular, Suzanne’s reaction to her brother’s condition is presented in language that is overwrought and clichéd: “‘Derek! Stop!’ She clenched her fists in front of her mouth and began to sob.”

This kind of overheated prose is in stark contrast with the detached, dispassionate eye that Helwig employs when she’s describing the public sphere, and it lends the novel a jarring, discordant aspect. Ignore the more histrionic scenes of familial strife and anguished love, however, and the novel stands as an unflinching examination of contemporary urban malaise and unease.