In the Skin of a Lion

Nicholas is the novel’s secondary hero and its second most important viewpoint character. He may also be regarded as the novel’s moral compass. Nicholas is a Macedonian immigrant who fled his war-torn village and moved to Ontario, finding work on the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct. He is so comfortable working in dangerous conditions and “his work is so exceptional and time-saving he earns one dollar an hour while other bridge workers receive forty cents. […] No one dreams of doing half the things he does” (35). Nicholas’s primary appearance in the novel is in Chapter 2, when he miraculously saves a young nun who was blown off the bridge, catching her in midair. He has an unusual relationship with language, having learned English by listening to actors and pop singers. His idiosyncratic, non-native manner of speaking leads his peers to perceive him as abnormal. This is an important point of commonality between Nicholas and Patrick. Although Nicholas is willing to put himself in mortal danger in his work on the bridge, he is terrified of falling asleep:

he would drink himself into it blunting out the seconds of pure fear when he could not use his arms […] knowing he’d witness the half-second fall before sleep, the fear of it greater than anything he felt on the viaduct or any task he carried out for the Dominion Bridge Company (49).

Nicholas’s reappearance as the proprietor of the Geranium Bakery is an important facet of the novel’s ethos of individual stories being connected to a larger, complete narrative.

Clara is a young actress whom Ambrose Small, the millionaire real estate mogul, seduced and made his partner. Patrick initially meets her hoping to mine her for information that might lead him to Ambrose, who disappeared years prior, but she seduces him and he quickly forgets his purpose. Although Clara’s love for Patrick is sincere, she is free-spirited and feels less attached to Patrick than he does to her. She holds a different attitude toward Ambrose. In her insistence that she must leave Patrick and join Ambrose in hiding, and in her returning to him even after his attempt to murder Patrick, she demonstrates a sense of subjugation to Ambrose from which she cannot fully break free until his death in Chapter 7. Clara enthralls Patrick because—with the notable exception of her bond to Ambrose—she is utterly uninhibited. She never apologizes for herself. She is an actress and she moves through the world unabashedly as the protagonist of her own play. Patrick seems drawn to her because she inhabits the world in this way—in a way he feels he cannot.

Of all the characters in In the Skin of a Lion, Alice is perhaps the most complex because she undergoes the most complete and dramatic metamorphosis. In Chapter 2 she appears anonymously as the nun who is blown off the Bloor Street Viaduct, miraculously caught in midair by Nicholas. Although she occupies much of that chapter, she does not speak, “words just on the far side of her skin, about to fall out” (38). “She had not even screamed when she fell,” Nicholas remembers (34). When she reappears in Chapter 3 as Clara’s actress friend, she speaks but remains mysterious and unconnected to her former identity as a nun—which is not revealed until late in Chapter 4. In Chapter 3, Alice’s ability to comfort Patrick in his depression over the loss of Clara shows that she is more emotionally grounded and stable than Clara—and that she is a better partner for Patrick than Clara.

Alice is the true protagonist of Chapter 4, in which she first appears in the disguise of the “human puppet” (117). She is so extroverted and verbal that she’s unrecognizable as the silent nun from Chapter 2, so there is a shred of irony in the fact that this chapter reveals her true identity. At the height of her metamorphosis, Alice is fearless yet deeply kind and humble. She memorably tells Patrick, “I don’t think I’m big enough to put someone in a position where they have to hurt another” (125)—a quotation he will remember after her death. Although she advocates for a workers’ revolution, she never perpetrates any violence herself. In this way she may be regarded as another of the novel’s moral compasses, along with Nicholas.

Along with Patrick and Nicholas, Caravaggio is among the novel’s trinity of heroes and viewpoint characters, but his adventures and perspective occupy a smaller portion of the novel. Two notable points of commonality between Caravaggio and his fellow protagonists are his comfort in dangerous situations and his feeling of freedom and uninhibitedness in darkness. Before his eponymous chapter, Caravaggio appears only in cameos as a fellow worker on industrial construction sites—a faceless example of yet another European immigrant laborer. In his first appearance in Chapter 2, it is mentioned that he gets in “another fight with the foreman” and “quits a year later” (28)—a first reference to his anti-authoritarian attitude. In Chapter 6, which is dedicated to his story and viewpoint, his identity and background finally become clear: He grew up in Italy and as a young man was inspired to become a professional thief after hearing other thieves describe their thrilling adventures. Though he is a criminal, he approaches his profession with integrity. He has “a medicinal clarity in his survey of the room” (191) that he will rob, and he understands that anonymity is essential to his success. “He would never leave his name where his skill had been” (199), and the reader understands that his name (an ironic reference to the historical Italian painter) is false. Crucially, Caravaggio inspires and changes Patrick, whom he meets when they are both in prison for their crimes. Under Caravaggio’s influence, Patrick finally grows into an identity—a self-righteous criminal—and finally finds a group in which he can be an active participant—a criminal band.

For almost the entire novel, Commissioner Harris is depicted as a cartoonish embodiment of capitalist apathy. When he first appears in Chapter 2 as the chief of the Bloor Street Viaduct construction project, he observes the viaduct from a distance at night so he can easily ignore the human beings working on the bridge and instead “concentrat[e] on form” (29). This attitude neatly illustrates an important motif in the novel: the dehumanization of laborers—the divorcing of their bodies from their spirits, and the exploitation of those bodies as tools. In adopting this attitude, Harris thus symbolizes the entire bourgeois, property-owning, entrepreneurial class. “Water was Harris’ great passion,” the reader learns in Chapter 2; Harris regards the viaduct as “his first child” (29). He reappears in Chapters 4 and 7 as the captain of another behemoth water-related infrastructure project: the waterworks tunneling under Lake Ontario. Paranoid amid growing unrest among the workers, Harris “insist[s] on sleeping there in his office […] a pistol kept beside his bed” (221). He remains a silhouette of a tycoon until Patrick confronts him in his office after breaking into the waterworks. In his conversation with Patrick, Harris alternately plays into the bourgeois stereotype and belies it. He justifies the opulence of the waterworks, saying, “We need excess, something to live up to” (236), but he also betrays insecurity, acknowledging silently that “those with real power had nothing to show for themselves. […] [he] was an amateur in their midst” (242). In this way, Harris serves a dual function in the novel. His cartoonish industrialist character highlights the chasm between the wealthy and the working class, which is an important motif in the novel. However, the revelation of his self-doubt betrays his vulnerability, which reinforces another of the novel’s important themes—that beyond class and demographics, all people have a shared humanity.

Ambrose is a symbol of capitalist dispassion, relentless self-interest, and indifference to the humanity of others. This attitude is neatly summarized in the statement that “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” (57-58). What distinguishes Ambrose from Harris is the way he personally offends Patrick through his hold on Clara. He’s also a man of lower morals than Harris, as he attempts to murder Patrick upon being discovered in hiding. A critical and abrupt shift in Ambrose’s character occurs in the final chapter, in the description of his final days before death. Whereas he had previously concealed himself from others with manipulative secrecy, allowing even Clara to “know him only as he wanted to be known by her,” in his deterioration, his “mind slipped free of its compartments as if what had kept all his diverse worlds separate had been pulled out of him like a spine” (213). In this final appearance, he is depicted in extreme vulnerability—a reinforcement of the novel’s theme that all individuals, regardless of status, are human and mortal.