Asylum.

André Alexis’s Asylum is framed by a first-person narration by “Mark,” a character who has almost no real relationship to the rest of the novel. He has lived in a monastery in Italy for over 14 years, and the novel is comprised of his complex weave of memories of a large group of people living in Ottawa before he came away. These characters include artists, political figures, professors, secretaries, and a group called the Fortnightly Club, discussers of philosophy. There are vivid vignettes of these lives—romances, intrigues, struggles with conscience, touches of violence and oddity. The narrative, which is omniscient despite the first-person frame, swirls around one grouping of characters and then another with occasional and sometimes surprising overlaps. Although ostensibly a first-person narration, much of the writing involves the inner feelings of characters which would have been opaque to Mark. This becomes persistently irritating to the reader.

The final effect is not altogether satisfactory. Alexis wants place to be the dominant, the thing which holds the book together, but his Ottawa is a mélange of walks, bars, restaurants, and domestic places that never rises to be the centralizing force of the book. Without that, and without anything approaching a real picture of the narrator except for a philosophical speculation that in describing the other characters and their lives he has “inadvertently described my own soul,” there is no real core to the novel. It has astute moments with a number of characters and their crises, but it finally has no narrative centre. The lives of others do not explain one’s soul, and Mark is not presented in anything approaching enough depth (in the 95 percent of the novel that is set in Ottawa he mentions his presence only seven brief times, and no one ever addresses him by name) to be of real interest to the reader.