Caribbean Beat — March/April 2018 (#150)

writing is gorgeous,” exclaims Borson. “It’s playful, the sentences
are beautiful, I love reading them. It has an ingenuous
charm. He’s one of the best writers out there today. He’s devoted
to the aesthetics of writing.” His mother, less effusive but still his
biggest fan, comments: “He can write a sentence — there’s no
doubt about that.”
His writing “reflects the world, in a skewed way,” says Borson.
“There is a philosophical basis, but his work is not academic.
He’s not scholarly. He takes in a huge amount of information,
then re-combines it in a way that is deeply thoughtful and yet
playful at the same time.”
The best example of this might be his prizewinning novel
Fifteen Dogs, Alexis’s most accessible work. As it opens, two
ancient Greek gods, Apollo and Hermes, are drinking in a
Toronto pub. (This is treated as a mundane event.) A drunken bet
leads them to grant the gift of human consciousness to a group
of dogs, in order to see if they end up any happier than humans.
The implications are tremendous:
the book is an extended rumination
on power, violence, religion,
love, language, and poetry — all
while presenting the world from
a canine point of view (sensuality,
savagery, smells, food).
“I’ve displaced the humans,”
Alexis says. “So when you look at
the dogs you’re not seeing them
as humans, but you’re not seeing them as dogs either. It’s a trick
of the light.” (Why dogs? Alexis’s stint babysitting a friend’s
dogsledding operation in rural Ontario may have had something
to do with that. As Borson says: real life, skewed.)
His books may be onion-like in their numerous layers, but in
person, Alexis is straightforward and easy to talk to, with not
a hint of pretentiousness. “I’m a very boring human being,” he
insists. “I basically just sit around and write.” In Toronto, his
sitting-around happens in a neighbourhood Starbucks café: “I
take a corner and I stay there for five hours. I usually have my
headphones in. I have a coffee, I have a sprouted grain bagel with
cream cheese, and then I write. That’s it.”
When he can, though, he prefers to go far away and
sequester himself: the book that gave him the most pleasure
was Pastoral, which was written “every single day” for three
“I just like ideas. Ideas are
my natural subject, because I
think the human mind is my
natural subject”
months, in London, England. “It’s a city I love, a city that I’m
a stranger in,” he explains. He also has fond memories of a
three-month stint in Buccoo Village, Tobago: “It’s my kind
of place because, think about it, nothing’s happening! It’s a
writer’s paradise. I was five minutes from the sea and I never
saw the sea! I’m a writer.”
And an ambitious one, at that. While most novelists are
grateful to get one book done and (if they’re lucky) move
on to the next, Alexis is currently working on a construct
of five. He calls it a “quincunx,” which is technically the geometric
pattern of five found on dice, playing cards, and dominoes: four
points arranged in a square, with a fifth in the middle. Interpreting
this as a kind of divine ordering, Alexis has written the first three
books of the structure, and is working on the fourth — but, to
complicate matters, the final book will actually be number three
of the series, the dot in the middle, connecting and illuminating
all the others. (“André needs to
challenge himself continuously,”
Borson muses.)
This massive project is not a
series in the conventional sense:
the first three books do not follow
each other in chronology, storyline
or form. Pastoral is structured
to reflect Beethoven’s “Pastorale”
Symphony; Fifteen Dogs is a Greek
apologue (a moral tale); Hidden Keys is a giant and pointless
riddle, inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
The overlap is in the ideas being explored, the rocks being
turned over.
Alexis says he had the entire structure in mind before starting
on the first book: “They all came to me at once — so I know
what the last one is. It’s convenient. But it’s also why I feel like
I’ve been doing the same work for the last ten years.” When all
five are written, he hopes to publish an omnibus edition, in the
proper order, which, he says, “will reveal the ideas in different
lights, and different depths.”
“The quincunx is probably the biggest project that André will
write in his life,” says Borson. Maybe she’s right. But — Alexis
being who he is — who knows? Maybe a sextet is percolating
behind those owlish glasses, even as we speak. n
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