Original Prin - Softcover

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Randy Boyagoda is one of Canada’s funniest and most provocative writers. A regular presence on CBC Radio, his most recent novel, Beggar’s Feast, was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize. His first novel, Governor of the Northern Province, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Born to Sri Lankan parents in Oshawa, he lives in Toronto with his wife and four children. He is a professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he is also Principal of St. Michael’s College.

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A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2018

Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family. Following a cancer diagnosis, forty-year old Prin vows to become a better man and a better Catholic. He’s going to spend more time with his kids and better time with his wife, care for his recently divorced and aging parents, and also expand his cutting-edge research into the symbolism of the seahorse in Canadian literature. But when his historic college in downtown Toronto faces a shutdown and he meets with the condominium developers ready to take it over―including a foul-mouthed young Chinese entrepreneur and Wende, his sexy ex-girlfriend from graduate school―Prin hears the voice of God. Bewildered and divinely inspired, he goes to the Middle East, hoping to save both his college and his soul. Wende is coming, too. The first book in a planned trilogy, Original Prin is an entertaining and essential novel about family life, faith, temptation, and fanaticism. It’s a timely story about timeless truths, told with wise insight and great humour, confirming Randy Boyagoda’s place as “one of the best satirical writers today.” (Micah Mattix, The American Conservative)

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Excerpt from Original Prin

Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family. Puffy and brightly balaclava’d, the six of them fanned across an empty parking lot. Ahead of them was a billboard advertising the zoo’s newest additions. Two furry gifts from China snuggled in the smiling Prime Minister’s lap, chewing bamboo shoots that pointed in perilous directions. Prin experienced a sympathetic twinge in his own groin. This was the day to tell them.

“The baby panda bears are turning into polar bears!” said his six-year old, Maisie.

“That’s just snow sticking to the picture,” said his ten-year old, Philomena.

“That’s called climate change,” said his eight-year old, Chiara.

“I won’t eat them!” said his four-year old, Pippa.

“Who wants a snack?” asked his wife, Molly.

He strode out in front, the family food-bag slung across his back.

It was lunchtime, and they hadn’t eaten since sort-of-an-hour before the Mass they’d attended at a plaster-walled church on the rusty eastern edge of the city. The church was fronted by chipped saints’ shrines and wedges of stumpy evergreen shrubs. Everything was fretted in winter road salt. The church was surrounded by an endless run of ethnic food stores and hair salons and paycheck advance shops, by mid-rise apartments and crime scene hotels and diners for old white people.

Inside, almost everyone was poor and South Asian. Prin’s own parents had come from Sri Lanka in the 1960s. His father had worked downtown, eighty hours a week, and raised him far from the city, in a suburban paradise of flavored coffee and televisions in every bedroom and streets named for fruit and kings and no other brown people.

Whereas, at a church like St. Teresa’s, in deep Scarborough, the people had gone up to communion in sincere moustaches and dark, dismal suits, in wedding gold and bright crimson saris that flowed into snow boots. The little girls wore braids past their waists. The boys wore quickly-hemmed dress pants over Lebron James-endorsed basketball shoes. Everyone had sideburns. Everyone was singing folks hymns to Mother Mary and her baby, songs that cut the heart.

He took his family to this church once a year, on January 1, in an aging Volvo with a trunk full of emergency supplies ― road flares, iPad chargers, unread New Yorkers ― and also the gingham grocery store bag that he was now carrying into the zoo, his family debating pandas and polar bears behind him, his wife asking him to slow down so everyone could have a snack.

The bag was full of bananas and avocados and also a St. Sebastian’s cranberry-and-spelt loaf that Molly had baked that morning. At the bottom of the bag was a champagne-foiled sparking juice bottle, which, in keeping with family tradition, they’d brought to toast the lemurs at the zoo on New Year’s Day.

Which was, this year, also the day to tell them.

This is why they had come, in spite of the weather and Prin’s father calling to remind him that morning that the Chinese now owned Volvo. Would you trust the lives of your children to car tires made by Falun Gong prisoners? To car tires probably made of Falun Gong prisoners?

His father was divorced, had sold his convenience store in the inner city to a condo developer, subscribed to a premium alternative news package, and had a lot of time to think and forward emails.

Prin was going in for surgery later that January, and he and Molly had decided to stop calling it just a potty problem. The plan was to take the girls to one of the more obscure exhibits and explain it there and leave it there, in a place they would never visit again.

Girls, something awful is growing inside your daddy. It’s called cancer, and it looks like this:

Mole rats: blind, pink, splotchy, writhing, they lived in a stacked complex of glass tubes. Their lives were spent crawling and squeezing over each other, their dull plump shapes pulsing and proliferating in low light. Who wouldn’t want a very careful doctor with a super-powerful robot assistant to cut all of these gross and pointless bodies out of their beloved zoo, their beloved daddy?

They would ask: would he bleed like when he was shaving and yelling that they were late for church? What does prostate cancer look like? Does it bite?