Mind Picker: Days by Moonlight

Beneath these small impressions, there was something deeper. I could feel the flow of that particularly Canadian thing: passion brought on by outrage. Outrage seeped into the Wolf and Pendulum and permeated the place: an outrage that turned, at times, to aggression, an aggression that few of those in the pub would have permitted themselves unless prompted by their sense of political imbalance – the fate of the poor, distant committees dictating to those who lived in Nobleton. In the Wolf and Pendulum, I recognized what you could call a “Canadian instinct” or, if you were being unkind, a Canadian addiction: moral reproach.

While I do think that Days by Moonlight stands on its own as an unsettling and intriguing piece of fiction that does more than most books to explore and expose the Canadian psyche, it's more important to consider it as part of André Alexis' “quincunx” project: a series of five novels, revolving around similar themes, that will ultimately interconnect like the pips on a die showing a five. Once again, I'll let Alexis explain the project that came to him as he attempted, and repeatedly failed, to rewrite Pier Paolo Passolini's Teorema:

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.

So far in the project, Pastoral is the, er, pastoral, Fifteen Dogs is the apologue, The Hidden Keys is the quest narrative, Days by Moonlight is the ghost story, and they've already begun to intersect in interesting ways: some dogs from Fifteen Dogs appeared in The Hidden Keys, and characters from Days by Moonlight go to Barrow (the setting of Pastoral), and not only has one of the characters read Pastoral, but they meet the priest that that book's main character was based on and he disputes his portrayal. In each of these books, Alexis makes statements in an afterword that I have found helpful for understanding his intent, and for this book, he lists the great travel novels that he found inspirational (from Dante's Paradiso to Gulliver's Travels) and writes, “Days by Moonlight is not a work of realism. It’s not a work that uses the imagination to show the real, but one that uses the real to show the imagination.” And that's truly the essence of this book, right there. So what's it about?

Alfred Homer is a young Botanist who has recently experienced a twin set of griefs and is invited by an old friend of his father's to accompany him on a brief road trip across Southern Ontario. This Professor Bruno intends to follow the trail of an obscure poet about whom he is writing a book, and knowing that there are some interesting horticultural specimens to be observed along the way, Homer agrees to be driver and companion on the quest. Because they are both travelling and interviewing people who knew the poet, this narrative is a mixture of the pair witnessing strange events – a community of Black people who don't speak during daylight hours, a visit to the Museum of Canadian Sexuality – and listening to fantastical stories – about witches, demons, and ghostly visitations. Much of what is witnessed is satirical in nature – in a way that does reveal essential truths about what it is to be Canadian – and the majority of the conversations are about art and truth and metaphysical belief – in a way that does reveal essential truths about what it is to be human. There's a lot packed into this small volume, and for the first time, I'm really getting a sense for the quincunx.

On a personal note: I enjoyed that this book travelled to places that I'm familiar with. In particular, I have never seen Stouffville – a tiny rural community where I lived for seven years as a child – in a novel before, and while I'd agree with Homer's assessment that it's “like any number of towns in the area”, I had to wonder why only its residents spoke like yokels, “I don't think youse are going to get much out of Gram. She hasn't been herself lately, eh?” (But as Alexis says in the afterword that these towns are “exaggeratedly, or (even) perversely portrayed”, I'm not actually taking offense. At least I'm not from Nobleton.)

I thought of the places we'd been, of house burnings and Indigenous parades, of good intentions and savage politeness, of stories and dreams. Were these, too, what was meant by “country”? It was easy to be at one with a world of autumnal trees and washed-out skies. It was something else to be one with a people's worst impulses, ideas, and behaviour. And yet, the Tim Hortons in Seaforth was where I first felt that when all is accepted, all is transcended.

I'm going to need to read all four of these books again before the fifth comes out; this feels like a truly remarkable project; truly art.

The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:

Days by Moonlight by André Alexis

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Reproduction by Ian Williams

The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.

Individual reviews of Alexis' Quincunx: