There was a little media kerfuffle last week about a fancy bar in Toronto where a lion cub was spotted on a leash, being paraded around as a pet. We wouldn't know about it if it weren't for Instagram. There was anger from animal-rights groups, who are opposed to the attempted domestication of wild animals (they say it is cruelty). It is also illegal in Toronto to have a lion as a pet.The general outrage and disgust was about more than the lion cub, though – it was about this kind of place, an expensive place of short skirts and high heels, whose flashy clientele attract all sorts of pious insults.
The exotic animal as pet is a universal and ancient sign of excess. The Mughal emperors kept them. In 20th-century popular culture they became a cliché of foreign despotism. Since then the exotic pet has been an almost mandatory accoutrement of the wayward celebrity: Michael Jackson had Bubbles, Justin Bieber has had a snake and a monkey. Darwin the Ikea monkey – confiscated from a patron with a Slavic name in 2012 – became a symbol of the dumb foreign rich.
All in all, it's very unCanadian. So is the bar in which this little lion was spotted. I have been to this place – it's the kind of place I really like to be invited to, because I grew up in Halifax, where such places will never exist. They were unimaginable even in Toronto a mere 30 years ago. The place is called Lavelle; it's new, and it exists on the 16th floor of a new condo building in downtown Toronto, part of a strip of martini bars that attract young people with inexplicable amounts of money and very little Upper Canadian restraint.
It has a swimming pool at its centre and a poolside feeling. The waitresses are beautiful and wear bikini-like black outfits covered with diaphanous sarongs. But there's another thing that makes people more subtly uncomfortable, too: It's not at all Protestant.
Toronto is a city famed for its conservatism – the sanctimonious icebox, New York run by the Swiss, etc. It's a place where restaurant sidewalk patios were illegal until about 1970. At Lavelle, you could be in Miami or Monaco. I heard quite a bit of Farsi being spoken, also a smattering of Slavic languages. This is the money that does not worry about getting into Trinity College or The National Club.
The night I was at Lavelle, women outnumbered men among the clientele. And what women: each dressed for a photo shoot, in towering heels and plunging dresses and hair – oh, what hair – so long and abundant. Most were under 30.
A bar such as this depends on having lots of women with long hair in it; beauty is its draw; and I don't know how they get them there in such numbers. The men were older, of course, but elegant and tanned, in natty narrow suits and no socks.
I know I have already described a scene that most Canadians find offensive. The insistence on physical beauty of a conventional kind is superficial. It excludes most people. It boasts of style and sex. Its gender roles are old-fashioned.
I looked down from the club's roof into the forest of new condos and was able to see quite a few luxurious penthouse terraces from above.
One of them had a large hot tub with a party of its own going on. There were bikinis on display there, too.
This city of two-storey brick sprawl has gone vertical. It has gone glass. There are no lace curtains on the glass. It has abandoned all sense of domesticity.
And there are bars such as this all over the place – in the new luxury hotels, there are 24-year-old Singaporeans and Pakistanis showing Toronto how to drink champagne in bulk and how to grow out your hair; and making the real estate market insane.
They are like Jay Gatsby arriving in West Egg.
They are revelling in pleasures that are at once conservative and subversive: conservative because of the gender roles being advanced and the materialism being worshipped, subversive because of their unashamed embrace of the sensual.
In our race to denounce these excesses as decadent, let us not forget that decadence and sophistication lie intertwined in the same messy bed, and that the land of pet lions, crass as it can be, is at least a lot more varied than its United Church forebears.
It is certainly a boon to novelists. We may still admire Robertson Davies, but we have read perhaps enough of him now.