Reviewed by Jerry Levy
On the face of it, Pan Bouyoucas’s Cock-A-Doodle-Doo appears to be a fairly straightforward and simple story. A very successful novelist of detective stories, Leo Basilius, decides he is finished with the genre and leaves Montreal with his wife Muriel to travel to the Greek island of Nysa, where, as a young man of 22, he once lived. He hopes the move will inspire a new writing endeavour, something unique and monumental, perhaps similar to the poetry and short stories that once filled his heart with joy while on Nysa. Something similar but on a much grander scale, guaranteed to seal the immortality of his fiction and his name. But a deeper dive into the novella reveals a more sophisticated story.
Basilius is a writer, a seller of dreams, but now he is devoid of those dreams and dried up inside. So much so that not only does he have nothing left to put on paper, he has nothing left to give to his wife and daughter, whom he gradually ignores. And Muriel returns to Montreal to allow her husband the space to write his grand vision.
Basilius knows this is now his time. His father was beset with Alzheimer’s at 67 and his mother had died of cancer at 63. If these diseases are hereditary, he knows that now in his sixties, he must write his masterpiece while on Nysa. Try as he might, inspiration doesn’t come to him, and the island has changed in so many unrecognizable ways since his youth.
Untoward and strange things start to happen. Perhaps the most disturbing is the coming to life of his fictional detective in Basilius' 16 novels, the celebrated and much venerated Inspector Vass Levonian. He had left Levonian in a terrible state at the end of his last novel, comatose and on feeding tubes courtesy of a run-in with a psychopath. Now the inspector looks completely healthy. As if that weren’t disturbing enough, Basilius begins to look for elusive inspiration in the form of a rooster, which sits for hours in a henhouse, contemplating the motivations behind a rooster’s song.
What is one to make of Basilius and his nemesis, Levonian? The latter dogs his creator, telling him to resurrect his crime fiction. He eggs him on and criticizes him for not allowing the protagonist of his novels to live a happy life away from the criminal dregs of society. And he chastises Levonian for putting him into a coma merely to extricate himself from any further crime novels. But why can’t others see the detective? Is it because our protagonist is an unreliable narrator? Delusional? Mentally ill? Perhaps Levonian is simply a part of Basilius’s subconscious mind?
One answer to the dilemma of why Levonian is perfectly healthy and has not died is that Basilius doesn’t want him to. Unquestionably, he respects and loves the detective. That seems reasonable, given that Levonian catapulted the author to the top of the best-seller list and made him very rich and famous. As the saying goes, never bite the hand that feeds you. To that end, Pan’s novella reads like a fable, like a modern-day telling of the beloved children’s 1922 classic The Velveteen Rabbit. In that story, a young boy receives a stuffed rabbit for Christmas. Over time, the rabbit shows its wear and grows shabby, its stuffing coming out. And when the boy gets ill with scarlet fever, the doctor orders the rabbit to be burned alongside all the boy’s other germ-infested playthings. The boy is crestfallen, as he loves the rabbit dearly. So on top of the trash heap, aware of that love, the rabbit cries real tears, and out of his tears grows a flower. From that flower, a fairy emerges, transforming the stuffed rabbit into a real animal. The moral is that because of the boy’s unremitting love, the rabbit comes to life.
Is this what we are looking at with Pan’s novella? That Levonian has come to life as a fully realized person with none of the injuries that left him in a coma because, despite the hard time Basilius gives him throughout, he indeed loves the detective. In fables, the lines between reality and unreality often blur. As the author of The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams Bianco, once said of her work: “If you do not respond to its magic, you have either travelled many leagues from its enchanted land or will never qualify to enter it.”
Pan’s Cock-A-Doodle-Doo reads like the best of poetry. There is nothing superfluous, not a single word that needn’t be there. There are a few descriptions of the many experiential luxuries befitting a Greek Island, such as food, swimming, the sweet smell of jasmine, and others, but many more elaborate descriptions would only have enhanced the novella. Similarly, the ending comes rather abruptly. It works, although it could have been fleshed out. As a writer and used to protracting fictional stories, Basilius himself might have wanted to do the same with the story. Nevertheless, it amounts to a wondrous short read, at times humourous and at others, haunting and complex.
Cock-A-Doodle-Doo is published by Guernica Editions.
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