The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf
Timothy Taylor
Fiction
Dundurn Press, 2024
352 pages
ISBN: 9781459753198
$26.99
Reviewed by Alexandra Groenwoldt
“How many chefs would be driven to a violent fury on learning they’d just prepped a $30 plate for a Brittany spaniel?”
Timothy Taylor presents the world of high-end restaurants and culinary excellence, one in which misogyny, cultural appropriation, and substance abuse figure prominently. Through the course of the novel, Taylor takes the reader from Paris to Vancouver to Tokyo, providing a vivid and delicious account of each setting.
The first-person narrator, Matthew (Teo) Wolf, starts out as an apprentice at the Parisian high-end restaurant, Le Dauphin. Young and green, he works his way up alongside the charismatic and flamboyant sous chef Frankie, and the independent and resilient chef Stephanie.
This involves 80-hour weeks, long days in the kitchen, and long nights at the bar. Barely one year in, Teo’s childhood friend Magnus (Magic), business-minded and extravagant, proposes to start up a chain of restaurants under the business title Magic Wolf.
A few years later, after an incident in Paris Teo accepts Magnus’s offer. He moves from Paris to Vancouver with Stephanie, resolved to trace his parents’ literal and metaphorical journey across the world by creating menus for his own restaurants that reflect what he has learned.
His culinary enterprise is tightly intertwined with his quest to unravel his parents’ past and discover who they truly were. A pilgrim offers a hint: “’The prisoner wants to be free, and so he roams. […] The refugee wants a home, and so she seeks and seeks.’”
Teo’s first restaurant, Rue Véron, is a marvellous success. He and Magnus soon open the second, Orinoco. Then the events from Paris catch up to Teo and converge with new mistakes and bad decisions. Teo is about to open his third restaurant when all he has built, professionally and personally, begins to crumble.
Taylor masterfully cooks up disaster early on, letting it bubble on the backburner, with readers dreading the moment it will boil over. He narrates the story with the wisdom and wistfulness of hindsight, which allows the reader to anticipate the tragedy that awaits. Teo is conscious of his past mistakes, and through him, Taylor reveals those of other characters.
Taylor tells much of the story in engaging flashbacks with frequent jumps in the timeline to suggest a story pieced together from the narrator’s memories, as he deciphers the chain of events that led to “the rise and fall of Magic Wolf.”
Timothy Taylor has a BA and MBA in Economics and worked as a banker until the 1990s, when he pivoted to freelance writing. Taylor’s short story “Doves of Townsend,” one of three nominated that year, won the Journey Prize in 2000.
His debut novel, Stanley Park, was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Vancouver and BC Book Awards. In 2004 it was chosen for One Book One Vancouver and in 2007 championed by musician Jim Cuddy for Canada Reads. He is also the author of Silent Cruise, a collection of stories that was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Award. His other novels include Story House, The Blue Light Project, and The Rule of Stephens.
Taylor also writes on food and wine as a contributing editor at Vancouver magazine, EnRoute, The Walrus, and Eighteen Bridges. He has also written for The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, Western Living, The Vancouver Review, Toro, Saturday Night, Adbusters, The National Post, and The Vancouver Sun. His non-fiction books include The Cranky Connoisseur and Foodville. He teaches Creative Writing at UBC. Just like his main character, Taylor is passionate about food and was born in Venezuela, the son of a nomad and a refugee.