by JULIET WATERS

Novels about Montreal published out of Toronto sometimes get things weirdly wrong. For instance, Globe and Mail theatre critic Kate Taylor created a Montreal narrator for her first novel Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, released a few months ago. Taylor's never lived in Montreal, which any Montrealer will guess as soon as they read the passage where her "Montrealer" explains why we don't often visit Toronto. Apparently we're secretly intimidated by its multilingualism. "We are surprised and puzzled by Toronto's reality. What if we were to speak not merely English and French, but Cantonese and Mandarin, Greek, Farsi and Italian? To a Montrealer the prospect is alarming. In Toronto, they barely seem to care, as if, there, language itself could be taken lightly."

Okay, stop laughing. It's kind of flattering that we're being appropriated. Think how much worse it would be if a Toronto writer could actually get it right. Part of the joy of living here is knowing what a complicated, unpredictable experience it is. Only a Montrealer, or a Statistics Canada junkie perhaps, might know that Montreal's language laws have, for some mysterious reason, produced a city that's significantly more multilingual than Toronto.

But getting Montreal right is a huge challenge, whether one has lived here or not. Michel Basilières, a Toronto bookseller, gets tons of Montreal facts wrong in his first novel, Black Bird. In his Montreal, a Quebec premier who imposes the War Measures Act during a terrorist crisis is the leader of the PQ. James Cross is killed instead of Pierre Laporte. One of the terrorists is reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which would have been published a decade after the October Crisis.

Of course Basilières also has women flying, Frankenstein-type monsters who escape from the Royal Vic and grave diggers who steal Brother André's heart. So this is not a story for anyone who's too attached to reality. Though he left Montreal almost a decade ago, after five minutes of talking to Basilières I have no doubt that he's fundamentally a Montrealer. Visiting last week, on the first day of the war, he describes the neighbourhood of his childhood.

"It was a dump," he laughs. This might surprise anyone who visits it now. Basilières grew up just east of Parc between Prince Arthur and Pine. A trendy, beautiful neighbourhood today, back then (he was 10 during the October Crisis) it was a grey, largely anglo working-class ghetto, just a few blocks away from the demarcation line between the grey, largely francophone working-class ghetto. Though Basilières' father was francophone, his mother was anglo, and he admits his French is probably not what it should be.

Basilières' Montreal may not be recognizable to a lot of Montrealers. But much in the same way that Gangs of New York looks nothing like modern day New York, the city's spirit is cynical and dark, but eerily familiar. Basilières' irreverent indifference to history is conscious. Though his primary intention is to interest the rest of Canada in a period of Quebec history they've forgotten, he believes the best way to do this is a wild appeal to imagination. "People are always criticizing novelists for getting facts wrong. But no one ever says to historians, "Hey you didn't tell a compelling story."

And his Montreal is indeed compelling. It's a gothic, violent, complicated, surreal Montreal. People's lives are patched together by so many different forces - language, chance, class, trauma - that the entire city begins to resemble the Frankenstein-type monster who will lumber along the streets. Even if you come to this story with a full awareness of the historical facts, the story is entirely unpredictable, and thus typically Montreal. On the surface it may not be my Montreal, and it may not be yours. Perhaps it's a new genre: multi-fictional. Whatever, at its core it feels more authentically Montreal than so many novels that strain to get it right. n

Black Bird by Michel Basilières, Knopf Canada, hc, 310pp, $34.95