Title Fifteen Dogs Series Quincunx Author André Alexis Cover Art --- Publisher Coach House Books - 2015 First Printing Coach House Books - 2015 Category Philosophy Warnings Explicity sex, violence, eating poop, sniffing butts Main Characters Atticus, Majnoun, Benjy, Prince, and several others Main Elements Anthropomorphism, gods Website ---

" I wonder", said Hermes, "what it would be like if animals had human intelligence."
" I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals – any animal you like – would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence."

And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto vet­erinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change.

The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks.

André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.

I bought this book because of the reference to Apollo and Hermes, rather than really thinking I'd particularly enjoy what I knew wasn't technically a fantasy but more an exploration of the human condition. Well, I'm glad I bought it because I really enjoyed it.

Fifteen dogs at a veterinary clinic are given human intelligence by a couple of greek gods (which is the last I thought I would see of the gods but eventually even more of them get invovled so quite satisfied my need for the mythological aspect). And just like humans, the dogs react to this in different ways.

Some, like those that join with Atticus want to go back to the good old days when they were just dogs, when they didn't have words for things like "sky", nor did they wonder if the sky went on forever. When all you worried about was food, sex, and your pack. The problem is, they find themselves as dogs pretending to act like dogs, and they have already half forgotten what used to come naturally as instinct, and this soon turns toxic, and those dogs that wish to explore their newfound language and emotions are killed or exiled from the pack.

One of the exiles finds himself a home where he realizes he is able to learn the human language, and after a moment of seriously freaking out his mistress, they learn to communicate with each other, enjoying a kind of friendship one could not have with another dog/human. Majnoun tries to explain how dogs think and why they do what they do, while the human Nira reads him literature or has him watch movies with her (where he fixates on two scenes involving dogs which probably had no actual importance in the movie at all but he tries to read in all kinds of underlying meaning from those brief moments).

Another exile becomes a poet, composing poems though he has no one to share them with. Yet another exile uses his intelligence to scheme and trick his way into a home with disastrous, and perhaps karmic, results. In a nutshell, there were as many varieties of responses to their intelligence as there are human responses to the same. And what may seem a blessing, something that makes them superior to other dogs, of course also made them other, outcasts, cursed.

It is not easy to give human intelligence to an animal, while still ensuring that it remains an animal and not just a furry human on four legs. They view the world differently, they have different needs and wants, and this affects how their intelligence works. Like when asking a dog if he understand love and the dog had to think hard about that comparing what Nira and her spouse seem to experience with what he experienced with say a female dog (mating yes, love no, and well, he was neutered after all) his family (he doesn't even remember them), and his previous owner (that was loyalty, not quite the same).

I found it wonderfully written, and while often graphic (I know this is a dog story but they killed a cat, awww, and mounting dogs of lesser rank was a form of expressing dominance, among other things) I was completely drawn in and interested to find out the fates for the dogs, just as Zeus was when he discovered the wager made between his sons. It was sad, and magical, and definitely thought provoking, well deserving of the awards it received.

Oh, and it didn't hurt that I was familiar with many of the Toronto landmarks, from the beaches on lake Ontario to Hyde Park.