Pastoral (2014)

Toronto-based writer André Alexis is an ongoing presence in Canadian writing, someone whose books (usually Childhood, 1998 and Fifteen Dogs, 2015) appear on the shelves of homes I have visited, yet a writer I have never read in book form until recently, when I saw a copy of his 2014 Pastoral in a box at AA Furniture & Appliances and thought, Okay, this time. 

As it turns out, Pastoral is the first of Alexis's Quincunx series, a configuration of five books, the most recent, Ring, was released in September, 2021. I am now 50 pages into Pastoral, and I have to admit, the going was slow at first, for no other reason than my aversion to young Catholic priests coming to town. But as there was something not quite inhuman about this servant of God (he was hoping for something larger than the town of Barrow), and because his butler brought to mind Georgia McKinley's Leroy from her short story "The Crime" (1959), I stuck with it.

The first turn comes in the second chapter ("May") with the sudden death of what had appeared to the priest as a potentially problematic parishioner, the unpopular Tomasine Humble, whose passing sets off a chain of events that gives the town much to talk about, wonder about, and this talk and wonder has consequences, too.

Here's the paragraph that turned me around, that reminded me I was reading a pastoral:

"After Tomasine's death, the ground in the graveyard was more dense than it had been, with another body -- the cold, curdled earth -- to digest. The currents of air that visited Barrow had one less person to circle or caress. And the wind as it blew through town made a sound ever so slightly altered. The ants had one less hazard, the birds one less predator, the worms one more meal. The foxes and coyotes could now go about their business without Tomasine Humble in mind. The fish -- carp, bass, minnows and catfish, mostly -- would have been very unlikely to feel anything at all, save that, in spring and summer, it had been Tomasine's secret pleasure to put her feet in the Thames from time to time, to feel the cold water run gently over them. No more of that hazard for the fish." (38)