I have been getting acquainted with the novels of the Canadian writer Andre Alexis over the past two months. His novel Pastoral is the first in a series titled Quincunx. One of the central characters is a priest who arrives in a remote village. As a young boy, he had heard a divine call—(he thought someone from the kitchen had called his name)—and that led him to join the seminary. But once he got there, his faith nearly collapsed. Eventually, he recovered from that crisis and is now earnestly committed to his vocation.
There are some strange stories about the place he has moved into. The priest himself witnesses two “miracles.” The first is a cluster of moths flying in a perfect circle. He mistakes this for a divine sign—until he soon meets a man who actually trains such creatures, and the misunderstanding clears.
The second miracle involves a man he sees walking on water, speaking something in an unknown language. When the priest tries to follow him, he plunges into the lake. As the other man approaches, muttering something, the priest shows him the cross—only to discover that the truth is even stranger: some eccentric engineer had fixed pillars under the water and laid mirror-like planks on top of them to let people cross the lake quickly. To calculate the distance between two pillars, the engineer uttered three words—those words were simply his way of measuring time.
But the main bulk of the story is actually about a young woman who is in love with a farmer’s son from the village, and their wedding has already been decided. The twist is that the young man is simultaneously in love with another woman. He says, “I can’t leave either of you.” His friends respond, “What’s the big deal? Cows live like that, don’t they?”
The story contains its share of humor like this.
The novel ends right at the climax of this tangled love story. In the meantime, the priest really does witness a genuine miracle. There are other memorable characters as well—such as a man from a family where men historically die of heart failure at 63. He spends his early life doing every daredevil act imaginable; in the second half of his life, he retreats into books and music. But when the doctor tells him that at 63 he has the heart of a forty-year-old, he is disappointed. He befriends the priest and they discuss about Life and death.
Humor is the underlying current of the novel. And scattered in between, the author writes lines like:
“As he walked into Barrow, somewhere around seven o’clock, evening was in the early stages of suffusion. The world was not yet dark. It was beautiful: a hint of winter in the air, the lights of the town turned on—one by one, it seemed—as its inhabitants, each in his or her own time, became aware of the coming darkness.”
The novels in this series are a delightful read for anyone who enjoys this kind of mixed-texture storytelling. I am currently reading the third volume.