André Alexis
Fifteen Dogs: An Apologue by André Alexis is a fable about dogs that begins with a wager between Hermes and Apollo. Apollo is convinced that any animal given human consciousness would be even more unhappy than humans. Hermes disagrees. The wager is later modified to specify happiness or unhappiness at the moment of death. The two gods bestow human consciousness on fifteen dogs who happen to be staying overnight at a Toronto veterinary clinic. The fifteen dogs escape from the clinic. Their fate is observed by the two gods as if it were a spectator sport.
We follow each dog as he/she tries to adjust to a newly developed consciousness and self-awareness. Before long, a fight for supremacy ensues. Some dogs reject their new ways of seeing and speaking and want to return to their doggy consciousness. They brutally murder those who oppose them. One dog becomes a poet and manages to escape their wrath. Another becomes devious and conniving, carefully engineering the deaths of the remaining dogs before he dies a painful death of poison. In the end, the poet is the lone survivor. Deprived of vision and hearing and suffering from an aging body with multiple ailments, he experiences an epiphany before being put to sleep on the cold, metal slab in the veterinary clinic. He recognizes the value of the gift he was given. He has a final vision of his beloved master and his spirit soars with happiness as he takes his final breath. Hermes wins the wager.
The novel has echoes of Animal Farm and The Lord of the Flies. The premise is interesting, but the execution is disappointing. The dogs fail to engage the reader. Their characterizations are not fully developed; their motivations are never adequately explained. Why did some choose to reject their new consciousness? Why were they so adamantly determined to crush opposition? Why did one suddenly experience a spiritual awakening but only after he had torn his former comrades to shreds?
The novel raises some interesting questions. Can we resist the pressure to abandon our individuality and conform to group behavior? To what extent are we willing to sacrifice principles in order to survive? Once we have familiarized ourselves with a different culture, can we ever view our own culture in quite the same way and/or retreat to the way life used to be? Is violence part of our human nature? Does the acquisition of knowledge necessarily alienate us from our community? Does knowledge come at too steep a price? These and other questions are dangled but never fully explored or explained.
There should be some internal logic to an allegory. It should have some correspondence to what it is ostensibly allegorizing, in this case whether human consciousness and human language is a blessing or a curse. But this novel failed in its exploration of these weighty issues. Instead, it presents us with haphazard events in which dogs run around helter skelter, behaving in ways that are erratic and inexplicable.
If the intention was to provide an insightful commentary on human behavior by using a fable about dogs as its vehicle, it simply failed to deliver. The book has won awards, but it just didn’t do much for this reader.