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. As engaging as it is, as often as one finds oneself gripped by Alexis’s story, this novel is not an easy read. It is a densely, often insistently philosophical book, a novel of ideas populated by characters who relate to each other and the world through the filter of philosophical discourse.

This high intellectual pitch of the novel is apparent from its opening pages as we pick up the story at a meeting of the Fortnightly Club, a kind of intellectual society that meets to discuss philosophical texts—Kant, Aquinas and the like. When the novel begins, the club is meeting in Walter Barnes’s backyard. Barnes is a professor at Carleton who is having an affair with Louise Dylan, another member of the group. Louise is married to Paul Dylan, a jealous husband whom we meet a few chapters later. One strand of the novel’s plot follows the violent, sad implosion of this triangle. Barnes finds he is falling in love with Louise and decides to end the relationship; the already irrationally jealous Paul leaps to the conclusion, based on some specious inferences, that Louise is being unfaithful, and a violent confrontation with Barnes ensues; Louise, heartsick from her breakup with Barnes, asks for a divorce.

Another strand of the plot involves two other members of the Fortnightly Club, Franklin Dupuis and his loyal but naive friend Edward Muir, who are employed in the office of Albert Rundstedt, the member of Parliament from Calgary West. Franklin, a failed politician, is an idealist committed to the odd idea of constructing a new kind of prison—an asylum—that will have a reformative effect on its inmates by aesthetics, a kind of safe haven for criminals.

The idea appeals to Franklin’s boss, the uninspired Rundstedt who, after being appointed to the Mulroney Cabinet, is casting about for a great work to call his own. So it is that Franklin finds himself in the unique position to turn his philosophical abstraction into concrete reality.

What follows, predictably, is disaster: there is a complicated, sexy scandal; government employees find themselves soliciting the services of unsavoury characters to secure the land on which the prison is to be built; there are budgetary cut-backs that compromise the whole project. In the end, there are difficult questions to be answered about the merit of an institution built (both literally and figuratively) on morally ambiguous ground. “So,” Franklin finds himself asking near the end of the novel, “what did it mean to be a good man?”

These are only two strands of the plot; there are other stories that can only be gestured toward in a review of this length. There is the finely detailed portrait of Rundstedt’s secretary, Mary Stanley, and her parents, who inherit a vast sum of money from her grandmother that implicates and enmeshes them in a complicated familial history, and the oddly melancholic portrait of Franklin’s sculptor friend Reinhart, who is commissioned to design the prison and, having done so, immediately ceases to be interested in it. Perhaps most notably, there is also the sympathetic and moving treatment of the Conservative MP Rundsted, who brushes up against History and finds himself the victim of a sinister design.

What links these characters and their stories is the city of Ottawa, where the novel is set. For Alexis the city functions as much more than a backdrop. It is instead a kind of large room that provides an acoustic within which a large cast of characters reverberate and resonate with each other. Life in Ottawa, the novel tells us, is simply unlike life elsewhere:

The implication is that Ottawa is more historical, more exemplary of a given historical moment than other cities because it mirrors the politicians who inhabit it. “Of course,” the narrator tells us in the next paragraph, “some aspect of a prime minister inevitably rubbed off on the city.” Asylum is therefore obliquely about Brian Mulroney, about the contradictions as well as the ambiguities, that have come to be associated with his legacy.

It is worth noting that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “asylum” entered the English language around the middle of the 16th century, when it was used to refer to “a place of refuge and succours..For to receyue all foreyn trespassours.” There are rare instances of it being employed as verb—as in “the assassin asylums himself in the Church”—but it is most commonly a noun, although a notably active one, describing as it does a space that performs a particular activity. This notion of space as productive, as having a defining influence on the lives of the people who inhabit it, is at the very heart of Alexis’s admirable new novel. As the narrator puts it in the final pages: “All the moments in a story depend on the place of the story. The moments happen in a specific environment and it’s that environment that gives them their weight and meaning.”