Lord of the Flies, with Dogs 
 Fifteen Dogs recently won its author the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada's richest award. Curious, I looked at the first page: "One evening in Toronto, the gods Apollo and Hermes were in the Wheatsheaf Tavern." What is this, the beginning of some joke? Looking further, I saw the story was mostly about dogs, fifteen of them at first, all duly listed in a "Dramatis Canes" cast list at the start. Oh dear, I thought; the last book I read gave me all the whimsy I could handle for a while.... But I was wrong, completely wrong. Just accept the premise, that the gods for a bet endowed a random group of dogs with human intelligence, and you will find yourself enmeshed in a book that is as brutal and thought-provoking as they come, a kind of 
 Lord of the Flies 
 , only with dogs.* 
 Thought-provoking, yes. Alexis calls this an Apologue, a word I had to look up. According to Wikipedia, it is "a brief fable or allegorical story with pointed or exaggerated details, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for a moral doctrine or to convey a useful lesson without stating it explicitly." One example they give is George Orwell's 
 Animal Farm 
 which, though entertaining in manner, makes deadly serious political points (as indeed Golding's novel did a decade later). Alexis also moves quickly beyond the stage of entertainment. Of the fifteen dogs released from their animal shelter by Apollo and Hermes, three are afraid to leave the premises, and the rest soon break into murderous quarrels about how to handle their new gifts. It is not long before the fifteen have been reduced to half a dozen. One of the most shocking things is how quickly the so-called gifts of civilization can result in acts of utter brutality. 
 There are five substantial chapters in this short but dense book; although following a normal timeline, they are more like musical movements than episodes in a narrative. As in a symphony, most of the drama comes early. In the first movement, as I have indicated, the drama is political, about how the first dogs to practice rational argument--or worse, puns and poetry--immediately arouse the suspicion of the pack. The second is about two dogs who return to human companionship, but treat their hosts in very different ways; it also tells of the further attrition of the original pack. The third is about the birth of religious faith. In the fourth, and throughout, Alexis deals with the philosophy of language, from the traditional speech of growls and barks, through the new god-given dog language flexible enough to deal with abstract concepts, to some approximation of spoken English. There are echoes here of 
 The Island of Dr. Moreau 
 by HG Welles, though without the Gothic overtones; Alexis is interested in how the acquisition of language changes one's sense of self, for both dogs and humans. The final chapter, both sad and very beautiful, is a meditation on death, happiness, and the purpose of life. 
 There is a touch of sentiment in these final pages, but Alexis comes to it honestly. He is careful not to anthropmorphize his animals, as most writers of animal stories do. No matter how sophisticated their thought, these creatures remain dogs in all their doggy habits of sniffing genitalia and eating excrement. Much more important is the insight to be gained by looking at human beings through canine eyes. One of the last survivors ponders at length what it means to be human. He cannot fully comprehend how anyone can live a life so limited in taste and smell, and where social structures are so subject to ambiguity and compromise. But we human readers catch glimpses of ourselves in what the dogs reflect, and the view is not always a comfortable one. I can easily understand the thought of the Giller Prize committee: once Fifteen Dogs entered the competition, there simply wasn't anything else in the same ballpark. 
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 *This is a serious book, but also great fun. So let me quote three jokes. The first is when a couple take in an injured dog and wonder what to call him: 
 -- Okay. Why don't we call him Lord Jim? 
 -- You want to name him after the world's most boring book? 
 -- If I wanted to do that, I'd call him Golden Bowl.The other two come from the most artistic of the dogs, Prince, who not only composes the fifteen dog-poems scattered through the text, but is also known as the creator of one-liners and riddles: 
 -- How is a squirrel like a plastic duck? 
 -- They both squeak when you bite them.Or, more metaphysically: 
 -- Why do cats always smell like cats? 
 -- Oh look! A squirrel!Old chestnuts, perhaps. But there is little else recycled in Andre Alexis' brilliant, entertaining, and penetrating book. Definitely a winner!