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Wednesday 4 October 2017

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

I think I was expecting to be more deeply affected by this book. I finished it over the weekend. My overwhelming feeling was polite interest, and then when I sat down to write the review yesterday, nothing came. And nothing good ever comes of pushing myself to write a review when I'm not ready, so I closed the tab and walked away, figuring I'd write about it today.

I spent a good portion of my walk to work pondering the question, and I'm not sure I'm a whole lot closer, although the words are coming out more easily. I feel like maybe this itself is the answer - this just isn't a book that I had a strong reaction to, for good or for ill. There wasn't much I didn't like, but there also wasn't much I loved. It unfortunately falls about directly in the middle of the road, a book that I recognize has value, but which never latched onto my soul and made me care.

Maybe it's that I'm just not really a dog person.

Cats, now, cats would be different - but cats are so fundamentally different from dogs that the issues wouldn't be the same. If you gave cats human capabilities, well...my cat already figured out how to open the refrigerator door, although thankfully she seems to have forgotten in her old age.

This book is about a deal between Apollo and Hermes in present-day Toronto. While sitting at a bar, they decide to give fifteen dogs (hence the title) human capabilities and see if they could be happy. Now, this doesn't seem to be a particular referendum on humanness, or if it is, it's not really a good one. What Apollo and Hermes do does not substitute humanness for dogness, it adds the former to the latter, so that these dogs, who are still dogs with all that entails, suddenly also have human capabilities and must figure out how to reconcile the two.

The other gods get involved - well, Zeus gets involved. There is mention of the other gods becoming interested and making bets, but nothing about them as individuals, which is a bit of a pity. Really, they're there to be a literal deus ex machina - both setting things in motion, and on several occasions, not being able to refrain from interceding further in these dogs' lives.

Some of the dogs don't even leave the pound where they are first given this massive change, staying and falling out of the story immediately. Most leave, but fall quickly prey to pack dynamics and the struggles to integrate human capability into doggish minds. There is a quick split between those who embrace their new abilities and help develop a new language, and those who want to return to being just dogs, with the problem that they do not necessarily entirely remember what that is. It becomes something like Judith Butler's theory of performative gender - these dogs pretend to be dogs, but with a dissonance between when they did so naturally and the artificiality of doing it now.

This causes distress, and eventually fratricide, as the changed dogs turn on each other in various ways, unable to sort out hierarchy in a more complex world. (Although one of the dogs who most embraces his new capabilities does so with humans.)

The question at hand, due to Hermes' agreeing to particular terms, is whether or not any of these dogs will be happy when they die. It's not a smart bet to have made, and how many centuries would Hermes have had to learn the ropes when bargaining with Apollo?  The answer comes, at the end, and on the whole it's not a bad one. I just wish I'd been more moved or engaged by the book as a whole.

1 comment:

  1. I would say this is one of the most depressing books I've ever read, made worse by the fact that I didn't feel I gained anything by reading it. It was an interesting idea for a story, which was my reason for reading it, but I didn't enjoy it at all.

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