Not As Good As Dogs...

André Alexis's wonderful Fifteen Dogs was a tour de force: original, thought-provoking, and clearly a magical fiction from the beginning. This new novel, the fifth of his five related novels, is not nearly as successful.

It starts out with a young narrator telling how he's driving a scholarly friend around rural Ontario so the older man can do research on the life of a mysterious poet. Unlike Fifteen Dogs, the clues that all is not what it seems don't reveal themselves immediately, and so the reader is led down a number of paths that he or she only tardily realizes are the stuff of fairy tales. This is annoying because the book is so full of botanical detail that one is tempted to think it's a fiction wrapped up in nature writing. Then comes the description of the fire lion flower that Jacques Cartier and his men used in orgies, or the hand-shaped ground cover that tastes good in salads but which is clearly a plant from the netherworld. What? was my reaction. This can't be! Spoiler alert: it isn't.

Similarly a number of thinly disguised figures from the CanLit world make their appearance. A cross-dressing museum guide named Michael bears a striking resemblance to an expert on copyright, while a poetess who made up stories about being abused as a child suggest another rather woman whose work was acclaimed but whose personal life was a disaster.

I read the book to its end, but that's about it. The other three books in Alexis's series will remain unread, I think.