Celebrated English abstract painter and writer Wyndham Lewis once described Second World War Toronto as a “sanctimonious icebox.” In the acknowledgements for Goya’s Dog, Damian Tarnopolsky cites Lewis as an inspiration for his first novel.

In London, Edward Dacres takes advantage of a case of mistaken identity and joins a tour of artists and poets who have been dispatched to bring culture to the colonies just as war breaks out in Europe. Tempted by a brass magnate’s assertion that Toronto holds many opportunities for a portrait painter, and assuming that his Englishness will lead to commissions there, Dacres jumps off a moving train on its way to Windsor and settles in Ontario’s capital city.  

Simply put, Dacres is a jerk. He seethes with contempt for almost everyone. As success eludes him and he spirals downward, a chance encounter with the brass magnate’s daughter, Darly Burner, pierces his armour of bravado and self-destruction.     

Tarnopolsky displays great command over Dacres’s character, slowly revealing the tragedy that turned him into a misanthrope even while dramatizing the ways in which he alienates the people who cross paths with him, from the hotelier at the King Edward Hotel to the working-class Polish immigrants who befriend him when he is homeless.

The novel suffers from the occasional misstep. The coincidences are too tidy, especially in the scene in which Dacres is physically carried out of another hotel only to be accosted by Darly, his saviour-in-waiting, who is a little like a fantasy figure, all “young and bright and overflowing.” 

Despite these occasional lapses, Goya’s Dog is a compelling story of an artist at war with himself. And notwithstanding its central character’s misanthropy throughout most of the novel, the story ends on a hopeful note, as if possibility, the ballast of the New World, were finally able to make its mark after all.