Running on the Knife’s Edge

In her novel Dogs at the Perimeter, Madeleine Thien’s project is a bold and difficult one. It is the project of our age, one that resists narrative, one that overwhelms narrative; one that is ultimately impossible to narrate fully, namely to traverse that place that human beings traverse at the soul’s murkiest. It is well that Thien’s novel begins at the fictional Brain Research Centre in a not so fictional Montreal. In such a place at least we can claim knowledge of, and experiment with, theories of the brain/mind’s reaction to the brutalities of living. Here we can probe how the brain observes, constructs and compartmentalizes violence and violent acts. This is the material that Dogs at the Perimeter is deeply engaged with—how to save anything other than brutality and terror from our encounters with brutality and terror.

The novel’s narrator, Janie, spent her childhood in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. But first we meet her working at the Brain...