Consolation by Michael Redhill
Published 2007 · 480 pages · 120,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Consolation to read?
Consolation scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
- Redhill writes in polished literary English, with some nineteenth-century period vocabulary in the historical sections. Accessible throughout.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Elegant sentences that move between centuries with ease. The prose is literary but not difficult.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Grounded in specific places—Victorian Toronto, the contemporary city—but exploring abstract questions about time, memory, and how the past persists.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Two timelines require attention, along with historical detail about photography and city development. The density is manageable.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- The connections between timelines emerge gradually. You must piece together how past and present illuminate each other.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Photographs, buried artifacts, the vanished shoreline—Redhill builds his novel from images of time is passage and persistence.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Redhill observes his characters with sympathy. The irony is temporal—how the present fails to see what lies beneath.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The novel provides emotional resolution while leaving some mysteries intact. The past cannot be fully recovered.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Alternating timelines gradually reveal connections. The structure is carefully designed, building toward convergence.
How Consolation is regarded
Consolation holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.