Space and Place

As most readers probably already know, Asylum is Andre Alexis’s second novel. It follows Childhood, which won the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award and was short listed for the Giller Prize. Second novels are notoriously difficult to judge on their own merits, particularly those issued in the wake of such fireworks. It is all the more so in the case of Asylum because some ten years have elapsed since his last novel. Many readers will either be prejudiced for or against the book without having ever read a page of it, having come to the conclusion that it must be either a work of genius (and therefore not worth reading) or the opposite (that no matter how good it is, it cannot be good enough).

And that is a shame, for Asylum is a fine novel. Weighing in at just under 500 pages, it tells a complex story involving a large cast of characters that unfolds on several fronts at once...