Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis review – a smart, exuberant fantasy

A novel about a pack of talking dogs, you say? The very idea will most likely breed thoughts of insufferable whimsy, like those paintings of mutts playing poker, or of more or less effective satire, in the vein of Animal Farm. It’s a grand thing, then, that this spry novel by Canadian André Alexis spends its 160 pages repeatedly defying expectations.

Expectations are set spinning from the very first sentence, which gives us the gods Apollo and Hermes having a quiet drink at the Wheat Sheaf Tavern in Toronto’s High Park. They discuss humanity, as gods do, and end up agreeing a wager, as is also the godly way. Give animals human intelligence, Apollo claims, and they’ll end up even more unhappy than humans are. The two of them happen to be near a veterinary clinic where 15 dogs are being kennelled overnight, so these become the guinea pigs for their Olympian experiment.

The dogs’ first glimmerings of intelligence are, sad to say, melancholy ones. Rosie, a German shepherd, finds herself wondering about her last litter: “It suddenly seemed grossly unfair that one should go through the trouble of having pups only to lose track of them.” Atticus, a Neapolitan mastiff, is having his favourite dream about chasing rats and squirrels, but, at the moment when he bites down on his prey’s neck, “it occurred to him that the creature must feel pain. That thought – vivid and unprecedented – woke him from sleep.” The dogs manage to open their cages, and soon they are outside. Three of them are too scared to use their new freedom, but the remaining 12 head for the lakeshore.

They make a motley pack, as a glance at the book’s “Dramatis Canes” will suggest, and indeed much of the dogs’ energy during their first days of freedom is spent working out their hierarchy. There is a flurry of violence, and for a time the book looks as though it will turn into a canine version of Lord of the Flies, but Alexis has little interest in doggedly following his premise to its most obvious conclusions. As well as their new problem-solving skills and introspection, the dogs perceive a deepening in their natural language, such that they can soon communicate abstract ideas.

Not that all of them are happy with their accelerated evolution. Atticus, the pack’s de facto leader, says, “We must learn to be dogs again”, and there is an interesting play on the idea of primitivism – that they end up “performing” doggishness, making barking sounds, rather than simply barking. There is a night of the long knives to eradicate the new thinkers, but two escape, and the book escapes with them. These are Majnoun, a black poodle who developed the new language, and Prince, who has started using it to invent rather good poetry. Majnoun, badly wounded, is taken in by a couple, Nira and Miguel. He becomes particularly attached to Nira and, in a further leap that in any other book you would have to call unrealistic, learns to understand and then speak English.

That this flagrantly lunatic twist works should give an idea of quite how impressive Fifteen Dogs, an award winner in Canada, is. Alexis doesn’t make a big deal of his twists and shifts; he just gets on with exploring the very local effects of the miracle on his characters, who seem to chew on the novel’s language the way a dog chews a favourite bone. The book is full of smells, the lake reeking “(marvellously) of urine, fish and a thousand dirty socks”. There are also gobbets of lit crit (which Jane Austen do you think Manjoun prefers?) and, in the end, a decent serving of pathos, which is, after all, the only thing we’ve got over the gods. I’m far from being a dog person, but as a book person I loved this smart, exuberant fantasy from start to finish.