Tancred was a tall and physically imposing black man, but he was also approachable. He could not sit anywhere for long without someone starting a conversation. This was, his friends liked to say, because his blue eyes were startling and his voice deep and avuncular. So, when he wanted to be alone without necessarily being alone, Tancred answered in French – his maternal tongue – when spoken to by strangers. Few who came into the Dolphin knew the language. But Willow Azarian did, and she took the fact that Tancred spoke it as a portent. They would be friends. She knew it and, touching his arm, she blithely began to tell him about her family.Reading the past two books by André Alexis (Pastoral and Fifteen Dogs), it was obvious that the author has been experimenting with old-fashioned forms of storytelling. But it wasn't until I finished The Hidden Keys and started to read the newspaper reviews of it that I finally learned that Alexis is presently in the middle of a larger, linked project – which he refers to as a “quincunx” – and this project is so central to the understanding of any one of the books that I'm going to put his own explanation of it here, as written in Quill & Quire :
For years, I tried unsuccessfully to rewrite (or re-imagine) a work by Pier Paolo Pasolini called Teorema. In Teorema, a god comes to earth and interacts with the members of a well-to-do family. This interaction leads to madness, despair, grace, and the miraculous. It’s a truly great story and I wanted to retell it, to own it as one does with some stories. I couldn’t, though. I ended up writing inept versions of Pasolini.The Hidden Keys, therefore, is the third volume of the quincunx – the quest narrative à la Treasure Island – and is meant to revisit the same themes as the two previous volumes. Huh. Here's what happens: Willow Azarian – a middle-aged super-rich heroin addict – approaches professional thief Tancred Palmieri in a seedy Toronto bar, and after convincing him that she is, indeed, one of the heirs to a billionaire's fortune, Willow begins to talk of a hidden treasure. Apparently, upon her father's death, each of his children had been given a unique memento – a painting, a poem, a Japanese screen, an architectural model, a bottle of aquavit – but only Willow believes them to be clues for a treasure hunt. As her siblings refuse to allow her to examine their objects on her own, Willow enlists Tancred to “borrow” them for her.
Or I did until I finally stripped the story down to its essence – divine visitation – and thought about the ways in which that essential story could be told. Five approaches came to me at once. I wanted to tell it as a pastoral (that is, a tale set in an idealized rural world), as an apologue (a moral tale involving animals), as a quest narrative (with Treasure Island in mind), as a ghost story (like Ugetsu Monogatari), and as a kind of Harlequin romance. The novels were suggested not by personal experience, not by grief or exile or post-traumatic stress, but by the art of storytelling itself.
The Hidden Keys reads like a crime caper as Tancred attempts to burglarise fortress-like homes; like a puzzle book as the objects are examined for hidden meanings; like a detective novel as one of Tancred's closest friends is a police officer investigating the thefts; like a morality tale as various seedy characters' behaviours can be traced back to their upbringing; and as a character study of the city of Toronto. It's not a rip-roaring adventure tale like Treasure Island, but in the endnotes Alexis acknowledges that a dozen other obscure works are also alluded to in this book. And what to make of it all?
On its own, The Hidden Keys has many nice moments of character and dialogue, with interesting philosophical and sociological musings. But I felt a bit let down plot-wise: the puzzle of the five objects wasn't very difficult, yet wasn't presented to the reader in a way that would have allowed me to make guesses ahead of the characters (and isn't that the point of a good mystery?) At this point, I can't really see how these first three volumes in the quincunx relate to each other (besides a surprise appearance by some characters from Fifteen Dogs to be seen here), and by itself, I don't know if The Hidden Keys is all that interesting or important. Yet, now that I know this is all one big project, I'm even more intrigued about what Alexis has coming up next.
– If there's a god, you were god's instrument. If there's no god, you were chance's. I don't know why people don't worship chance. It's as powerful as any of the gods and it doesn't need money, doesn't punish, doesn't care what you eat on Friday. I'm not a believer, but if I was going to be, I'd worship chance. You could have churches that look like dice.
Despite his mood, Tancred smiled. He briefly imagined a white, square church with a ⚄ on its side. The idea was absurd, incongruous and maybe unholy, but it was also appropriate. It was exactly the kind of church Ollie would frequent.
Individual reviews of Alexis' Quincunx: