André Alexis on bringing ‘the energy of being in love’ to his fifth novel, Ring

“I am fundamentally an immigrant.”

André Alexis came to Canada from Trinidad at four years old, an age at which he was conscious that he was taking information in but not necessarily understanding it. An age where everything meant something different than what it meant before. In his elaborate 12-year writing project, the quincunx, Alexis says he is placing you, the reader, in the situation of an immigrant.

With Ring published last fall, he completes his five-novel cycle that started with Pastoral, followed by the Giller-winning Fifteen Dogs, then The Hidden Keys and Days by Moonlight. There is no pressure to read them in that order, since the chronology matters less than the formation of the quincunx itself.

“You will come back to University Avenue, to the lake, to farm fields and corn. You don’t know why they are being insisted upon. You’re now in an area, the quincunx, where you have to discover for yourself what is going on. So I’ve just spent 12 years trying to make you feel like I felt when I was five,” Alexis says.

Each novel also takes on a fiction genre, with Ring inspired by the Harlequin romance. And though it’s the last book to be published, Ring is the centre dot that ties everything together. Here, Alexis talks about the human impulse to seek out the divine and the way the entire quincunx is haunted.

In Ring there’s a divine gift: Gwen is in a long line of women to inherit a magic ring. She wonders if it really is beneficial, though, or if it’s a kind of curse.

What interests me about the divine is that it is, in fact, a creative construct. There’s something about our devotion to a created concept that is dangerous, always, but it is also tremendously beneficial. The divine is huge in all five novels, including in the one novel where God is not explicitly mentioned, which is The Hidden Keys.

You’ve built all these patterns, echoes and resonances between the books in the quincunx. What’s the purpose of that, beyond the fun of connecting it all?

I was very influenced by the Oulipo, an organization formed to join mathematics with literature. I’m not interested in most of the experimentations the Oulipians produced. What does interest me is the notion of things buried beneath the surface, in part because hidden form is the classic argument for the existence of God. My nod towards the Oulipo is the geometric arrangement of the novels, a nod towards gardens and the god-like. My wager is that you as a reader may not know what the order suggests, but you perceive it just below your conscious level.

Gwen feels “the uncanny feeling when the world fusses over the details of one’s life,” and as a reader, these repetitions do feel uncanny.

I hope it is, because that would mean I have succeeded. That sense of recognition is important in how we think about the divine, but also, in Ring, how we think about those we love or we may love: a sense that we’ve always been in love with them, or there’s always been something that ties us to this person. It might be illusory – it isn’t a rational sense – but that feeling of having been here before makes a deeper sense to my psyche.

You’re in the process now of creating an omnibus edition, bringing all five novels together. What are you finding in rereading the earlier books?

I have a certain amount of respect for the André Alexis who wrote Pastoral in 2009. Each André Alexis is the master of that novel they wrote, and I’m not trying to question their authority. It’s more about me being the steward of the whole now. What I’m thinking about are the correspondences, or fixing what I feel is a lack here or there. The name Brown figures throughout the novels in strange ways. That’s the kind of detail I would sharpen.

None of these novels is in the ghost story genre, but maybe all of them are a ghost story in a way.

Of course you can talk about how the genre conventions that each novel follows are, in fact, haunting the novels themselves.

The quincunx is intensely interested in place, and places are haunted by our memories.

Places are absolutely haunted by your emotional experience. In places that I love I have left some aspect of my life, and they’re brought back when I’m in those places. It’s no surprise then that the places that have been the most haunting for me – Ottawa, Toronto and Southern Ontario, where I grew up, the only Black family for miles – are huge for me. In Ring especially, a lot of the places mentioned are places I’ve been with someone I was in love with at the time: at the corner of King and Jameson or in the Beaches. I was interested in the energy of remembering being in love, because I’m writing a novel that is about love.

You wrote Ring while living in Berlin. When I lived there, as someone who grew up in Toronto, I was surprised by how familiar it felt. How was writing a Toronto novel there?

This is a really interesting side effect of seeking to write the novels in different places. Ring is like the ring of the Nibelungen. I was reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales when I was there. I was also starting to read in German. If you play a certain kind of music, it influences how you hear sound. In the same way, learning German influenced how I heard English, how I thought about English, and also, being in Berlin influenced how I thought about Toronto as well. Ring, for all that it is demonstrably a Canadian novel, is in my mind a Berlin novel. It’s still deeply Canadian: When you’re not in Canada, Canada’s more intensely there for you, and so it was for writing Ring.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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