couple of white film trucks were parked along Bishop below Ste-Catherine, where the smell of a cigar transported me back to an unexpected corner of the past: the remembrance of my father smoking Dutch cigarillos at his desk until the large ashtray was filled with their broken ends. Then he’d be at it again after dinner, or driving between Montreal and our country house in the Eastern Townships, in the Jaguar with his driver’s window rolled down. We never minded the smell, never minded at all. It was his smell, the smell we so associated with him. As children growing up in England in the ’60s, we’d launched a campaign to stop our parents’ smoking, my brother Daniel inserting into my father’s tins of Schimmelpennicks and my mother’s packs of Gitanes little pictures of warning — of the planet drawn as a skull with a cigarette in its teeth, or of the world disappeared in a cloud of smoke. My mother quit. My father… well, living on his island apart, he was a lost cause. Too much on his mind, too much of a patriarch to take instruction easily — least of all from his own kids.

The apartment my parents bought in London toward the end of my father’s life had been my mother’s reward for having returned with him to Canada a couple of decades prior, leaving behind the house in London and the continent where she’d been a model and an actress and had expected to live for the rest of her life. By the time of its purchase, my father was in his sixties and had already been through one bout with cancer, and the benefit of the deal for him, he told me later, was that he’d be allowed to smoke one cigar — a Romeo y Julieta, or a Montecristo no. 4, his preferred — for each Atlantic crossing they made. On one such trip, he and I met up with my mother and my sister Emma in the grand bar of the Langham Hilton on Portland Place. Our conversation came round to one of my sister’s close friends, who was living in Cairo with her Jordanian boyfriend. His uncle, Emma reported gravely, had been on the parade stand when, in 1981, Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat had been assassinated.

“He’s finding it very difficult,” said Emma.

“Oh,” said my father. “He’s the sensitive type.”

My mother, reproaching him, said, “You’ve had two cigars.”

“How do you know?” asked my father, surprised.

“I can smell it in your hair,” she said.

My father looked across at my sister and me and winked. “Next time, I’ll wear a hat,” he said.

It was funny then, though after his second cancer less so. He quit for a time, but it did not take long before I found him on the patio of our house on Lake Memphremagog, not yet ten in the morning, having a cigar with his black coffee. He turned as I came down the steps and motioned me to the chair beside him, the two of us settling in to look at the glassy lake for a while. He raised the cigar to his mouth a little sheepishly but clearly for me to see. He’d been smoking just two a day for a while, but lately his will had been breaking. The look he gave implored me to say nothing. It said: I tried to quit, but I can’t. I don’t know how.

’d come to Montreal to drop in on the making of the film of my father’s last novel, Barney’s Version. The production was camped outside Grumpy’s, a bar just a few blocks away from the apartment at Le Château, opposite Holt Renfrew at Sherbrooke and de la Montagne, that my parents moved to after most of the kids had left and they’d sold the house in Westmount. My mother, an adopted child who’d grown up in Pointe St-Charles, one of the poorer parts of the city, would tell us how she used to pass the imposing building, with its copper roof and faux turrets, and dream of living there one day. The idea seemed absurd to her then, but later, when she was working as a model for Eaton’s and Chatelaine in Toronto and Coco Chanel and the House of Dior in Paris, the world started opening up to her wonderfully. It was in London in 1954, the day before his wedding to Cathy Boudreau, that she met the somewhat terse, occasionally pretentious but brooding and impressive man who was my father. She was apartment-hunting with the playwright Ted Allan, a lifetime friend, and was married to my brother Daniel’s father, Stanley Mann; my father had moved to London after sojourns in Ibiza, the south of France, and then Paris. Six years later, she married him.

Barney’s Version, like his earlier novels St. Urbain’s Horseman and Joshua Then and Now, draws on my parents’ exemplary love and what, even to his death, struck my father as the wild unlikelihood of having been able to love and raise a family with this striking woman. From Jake Hersh’s beloved wife in St. Urbain’s Horseman (“Nancy. Nancy, my darling”) to the third Mrs. Panofsky of Barney’s Version (“Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire”), there exists in his work a portrait of the shiksa wife as love object that his author hero is stunned to have acquired but also believes, in some buried and persecuted Jewish part of himself, he is besmirching. Truth be said, to equate my father with the narrators of his novels is to ignore the myriad ways in which a writer supersedes the mere imitation of reality in his fiction, though my dad was sufficiently aware of the tricks a writer plays that he could make fun of this idea. To wit: when my sister Emma published her first book, Sister Crazy, a set of linked short stories that I’d found hugely enjoyable but that the Canadian press had mostly treated as thinly veiled autobiography, I’d suggested at lunch with my mother and father that perhaps her collection would have been better received had it been described as a fantastical memoir.

“Oh, no,” my mother said adamantly. “It’s a novel.”

And I thought, “Well, sure it is. The mere arrangement of experience into a story makes it a fiction even before whatever of the novelist’s other processes come into it,” though I’d not even concluded the thought before my father added, “But don’t worry — you come out looking pretty good.”

The line between what is fiction and what is not can be vague, and it speaks enough to the way my father drew from his own life in Barney’s Version that within the family we discussed, in particular, the producer Robert Lantos’s choice of the British actor Rosamund Pike to play “Mom,” rather than “Miriam,” and thought it only good sense that the two women should eventually meet. And in Montreal they did, at a dinner Lantos himself arranged before the shooting started. (The family, I should point out, had nothing to do with the making of the movie, beyond being the production’s well-treated guests.)

The apartment at the Château was my mother’s choice, and my father was comfortable enough in it, mostly because of its proximity to a couple of his regular haunts. When he was still living in Westmount, in the ’70s, he would take the much longer walk down the stone and wooden public steps that flank Mount Royal and descend through the woods and by the glorious houses that mostly anglophones used to occupy. Then he would continue along the streets of downtown and on to the Press Club at the Mount Royal Hotel on Peel, a bar for journalists with a gradually diminished franchise that later moved to a tawdry penthouse location at the corner of de la Montagne and de Maisonneuve before it finally folded. There were two English daily newspapers in the city then, the Star and the Gazette, and a baseball team in Jarry Park; the Canadiens were contenders, and, to a Montrealer like me, kids from Ontario seemed downright strange. (I remember, aged fourteen, meeting Kelly from Oakville, who was definitely neither Gallic nor Jewish and seemed like a character out of an Archie comic, with a button nose and freckles and so incredibly white.) But after the Parti Québécois victory of 1976, and then the narrowly defeated referendum of 1980, the economy collapsed and the Anglos took flight, and even the old Maritime Bar at the Ritz, my father’s favourite, closed — this, long before the building was shuttered up to be turned into condos, still a construction site when the film crew moved in to restore it.

In Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy-Case — the third in my father’s trilogy of kids’ books — Jacob Two-Two’s mother asks the dad why he puts up with Perfectly Loathsome Leo Louse. “Because Leo’s an original,” Jacob Two-Two’s father says. The bars my father later frequented — Grumpy’s on Bishop, Winnie’s and Ziggy’s on Crescent — were full of such people, the sorry last stand of dwindling anglophone Montreal in its struggle with the separatists. Montreal’s wealthy anglophones had by and large proved the extremist Québécois absolutely right, Westmounters having shown little or no loyalty to the territory as they followed their money down the 401 to Toronto. The Anglos left behind in these bars were more his type, people who didn’t have the means to leave — and who wouldn’t even if they could have. There was the Irish-born detective, whose partner was a French Canadian (the existence of this wry and unlikely pair having preceded by a couple of decades the comic premise of the movie Bon Cop, Bad Cop); Nick Auf der Maur, the newspaperman-cum-politician turned habitué of Crescent and Bishop streets; Ashok Chandwani and a few other journalists from the Gazette, drinking away their afternoons; and Richard Holden, a man my father regarded as a political turncoat (the elected member for Westmount, he’d left the Equality Party to join the Parti Québécois) but whom he liked anyway.

My dad was in the thick of it, and I was not. For much of this period in the ’80s and ’90s (when Barney’s Version was written), I was living out of the country, and on my occasional trips home I found the old anglophone downtown a broken, dispirited place. There was a seaminess to those bars, impervious as they were to the historic changes being played out a few steps away, in the bright light of the street. But it was entertaining to my father, this atmosphere.

“Hey,” Auf der Maur called out to me from a bar stool at Winnie’s when I’d returned from England for a brief visit. “What’s the worst thing about being an atheist?”