Montreal: Vive la différence

Then again, any fiercely proud Québécois will tell you that they speak the purest form of French imaginable — a language that has not been diluted by Franglicisms such as “le bifteck” or “le weekend”. In fact, Quebeckers are so rigorous about guarding their native tongue that they have enacted all sorts of language ordinances to stave off Americanisation. The infamous Law 101, passed in the 1970s, banned the use of English within Quebec on all road signs, public advertisements and shop fronts, even though the province has more than a million Anglophone residents. Quebec is a province that fiercely guards its independent identity, and sometimes seems like a separate country within a country.

This separateness, coupled with an ebullient cultural schizophrenia, is one of the many reasons Quebec remains, for me, such a compelling place. After all, places are like people — the more complicated (and frequently maddening) they are, the more interesting they seem. And in its own tangled, exuberant and frequently maddening way, Montreal might just be, after New York, the most interesting city in North America.

But be warned — Montreal’s pleasures aren’t rooted in the big visual moment. Rather, its addictive character is predicated on the fact that it remains a collection of neighbourhoods. Each one contributes in one way or another to the internal debate about Quebec’s identity, about federalism versus separatism, and about whether you can actually get away with using the English language in certain corners of the city.

Consider the case of Westmount and Outremont — the most fashionable inner suburbs of the city. In Westmount you will only find Anglophones, whereas Outre-mont is a completely French-speaking neighbourhood where you’ll hardly find a native English-speaker in residence.

That’s not to say that there is a Berlin-style wall separating the two communities. It’s somewhat subtler than that. Most young citizens of Montreal are impressively bilingual — to the point where you hear slacker kids on the metro switching between the two languages with street-smart rapidity. But when you walk around the leafy, red-brick urbanity of Outremont, you are very much aware of the fact that this is haut Québec — the preferred district for the upper echelon of the city’s Francophone professional classes. Here, English is spoken with profound reluctance. Then again — so the civic logic goes — why would an Anglophone ever wander into Outremont in the first place? When I attended a concert by the wonderful Québécois pianist Louie Lortie, I wandered around the foyer of the concert hall at the interval to see if I could hear a couple of concertgoers speaking English. I couldn’t.

That’s the intriguing thing about Montreal — every time someone opens their mouth, they make a political statement. Among my Québécois friends, I often ask the question (en français, naturellement): “Au début, êtes-vous québécois ou canadien?” To which most of them diplomatically answer: “Québécois et canadien.” But they always mention Quebec first.

The fact is that for all the talk about the language divide, there’s still an underlying sense that there is an entente cordiale between both communities — that, in true Canadian style, any fractiousness is overwhelmed by the need to maintain a certain polite status quo. That’s another one of Montreal’s intriguing dualities, the tug between Gallic ardour and Canadian niceness, to the point where one Quebecker told me the following joke: “How do you get a hundred Anglo-Canadians to leave a bar? You say: ‘Please leave the bar.’”

You don’t need a degree in Canadiana to understand the sardonic subtext of that joke. To most Quebeckers, the rest of Canada is, by and large, a vanilla-ice-cream version of the USA. To most Anglo-Canadians, Quebec is the cantankerous brother within the national family — endlessly bitching about the lack of respect accorded to him, endlessly asserting his independent status, always talking about permanently disassociating himself from the rest of the household, while simultaneously recognising that without his familial ties, he will end up feeling like a little boy lost in the big, bad world.

FOR ALL its New World North American sheen, there is something intriguingly alien about the city. Take an extended walk down a boulevard called St Laurent and you will begin to get the curious measure of the place. One moment, you’re in an old-style immigrant quarter — a melange of Middle Eastern and eastern European shop fronts, all with that authentically scruffy look one usually associates with London’s Mile End. A little way further down this boulevard, you happen upon new loft developments, a seriously hip arts-and-film centre, plenty of upscale restaurants and the usual plethora of cafes where demonstrative intellectual argument is still the order of the day.

Granted, this sort of urban mishmash — the chic rubbing shoulders with the grubby — is a facet of most modern cities. In Montreal, however, there seems to be an easier melding of these two disparate urban worlds. This might have something to do with the fact that, here, the dividing line between the immigrant communities and the city’s youngish population is a blurred one. There’s a good reason for this: though Montrealers complain about rising property prices, they also know that theirs is still an affordable big city, and one where the price of a one-bedroom flat in a decent area is about 65% less than its equivalent in London. All those years of complex separatist politics have kept prices reasonable.

The affordability of Montreal gives it a certain democratic patina — a sense that the usual urban economic divide isn’t as vast here as it is elsewhere. Which is also one of the reasons why even the toniest districts of town don’t stand out like nouveau-riche sore thumbs. This is a city of quartiers — you’ll find yourself increasingly drawn to the spindly little streets in the Mont Royal district, with its old terraced houses, often of brightly painted timber, all architecturally caught between old and new worlds. And, while walking the streets of that ever-rejuvenated waterfront district called Old Montreal, keep looking upwards, because the area has some of the best art-deco office blocks imaginable: dark, imposing testaments to 20th-century mercantilism and a certain austere French-Catholic approach to the business of making money.

OF COURSE, a certain underlying austerity has always been an inherent facet of the French-Canadian character — to the point where, back in the pre-Trudeau era of the 1950s and the early 1960s, Montreal was always considered a profoundly conserv-ative town. Without question, the social and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s transformed the city — unleashing a libertine streak that had always lurked below the discreet, traditionalist Québécois surface, and suddenly manifested itself with a vengeance, to the point where Montreal is now considered delightfully louche when it comes to la vie sexuelle.

The city’s main ecclesiastical landmark, the Notre Dame Basilica, hints at this split personality: an imposing, puritanical facade hides a wildly ornate interior.

This just about sums up the essence of the city ... as does something I saw on an early-autumn Sunday afternoon while taking an extended stroll in Mont Royal, the city’s extraordinarily large park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (who was also responsible for New York’s Central Park). I approached it through the residential lanes of Le Plateau, passing stately mansions en route, following the percussive sound of drums (certainly something I didn’t expect to hear in such a staid neighbourhood). The drumming grew louder the closer I came to the park gates, then I found myself amid a crowd, listening to a rasta percussion ensemble near a statue to some venerable French Catholic city father. The average age of the audience was about 20, the sartorial style was unapologetically slacker, there was more than the occasional whiff of cannabis in the air and the atmosphere was, in true Canadian style, politely raucous. It was an impromptu Montreal rave.

Then I stepped into Mont Royal. The drums faded away, the world grew quiet, and I found myself in something approaching an inner-city Illyria: a large hilly, heavily forested park, green, deep, enveloping; a hint of the wilderness amid the vicarious pleasures of city life. The deeper I hiked into its interior, the more I forgot that I was in a city. Then, eventually, I made it to the summit of the mount that is Mont Royal, and the compact cityscape of Montreal was spread out before me, dwarfed by that big watery gash called the St Lawrence River — further proof that, in Canada, all human endeavour is always dwarfed by the land.

Standing less than six feet away, a young couple were evidently in a state of intense mutual disaffection — they were all but yelling at each other. Only theirs was perhaps the most original domestic dispute I’d ever overheard, as he was speaking to her in vehement English, while she was hissing back at him in guttural Québécois French. And I thought: this is the perfect Montreal moment.

Douglas Kennedy stayed as a guest of the Hôtel St-Paul

Douglas Kennedy’s new novel, A Special Relationship, is published by Hutchinson on August 28, price £12.99. To buy it at the reduced price of £10.39, excluding p&p, call The Sunday Times Books Direct on 0870 165 8585

TRAVEL BRIEF

Getting there: Air Canada (0870 524 7226, www.aircanada.com) flies from Heathrow to Montreal (from £540); and from Manchester and Glasgow (from £559), via Toronto. British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) also flies from Heathrow. Air Transat (0870 556 1522, www.globespan.com) operates charter flights from Gatwick; from £357. In Ireland, Ebookers (01 241 5689, www.ebookers.ie) has flights from Dublin via Heathrow with BMI and Air Canada; from €565.

Where to stay: chic and stylish, the Hôtel St-Paul (355 Rue McGill; 00 1 514-380 2222, www.hotelstpaul.com; doubles from £110) is the best of the city’s new bou-tique hotels. Or try the simpler Hôtel du Vieux-Port (756 Rue Berri; 844 0767; doubles from £60).

Tour operators: Virgin Holidays (0870 220 2788, www.virgin.com) has three nights at the four-star Wyndham hotel from £519pp (seven from £669pp), including flights from Heathrow (add-on flights from Manchester free, Glasgow £20pp). Or try Canadian Affair (020 7616 9999, www.canadian-affair.com), Tailor Made Travel (01386 712053, www.tailor-made.co.uk) or Travelbag (0870 890 1456, www.travelbag.co.uk).

Where to eat: the Cube restaurant at the Hôtel St-Paul (see above; mains from £10) is a favoured hang-out of the beau monde. L’Express (3927 Rue St Denis, 514 845 5333; mains from £7) is a classic French bistro. Nearby, Toqué! (3842 Rue St Denis, 514 499 2084, mains from £9) is the favourite of serious local epicureans.

Further information: call Destination Quebec (0870 556 1705) for brochures.