“Alibi” by Robert Kroetsch

It isn’t always apparent to his readers and critics, but at the heart of Robert Kroetsch’s fiction is his avowed belief that storytelling, straight-up and unaffected, is the novelist’s primary concern.

Readers of Kroetsch’s books are apt to get the feeling that metaphoric calculation often takes precedence over the delivery of the narrative. Certainly there is hardly a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, in Kroetsch’s new novel Alibi that does not rattle with extended meaning.

Reading Alibi, I sometimes found myself wishing Kroetsch were a little truer to his ostensible belief in simple storytelling. I was simultaneously grateful that he is not. For although the novel’s metaphors are at times rather heavily embossed on the text, they are, for the willing reader, a challenge of a sort only sporadically available to readers of Canadian fiction. They are a labyrinth, a game, an elaborate network of hints and suggestions. So elusive are the metaphors, at times, that their elusiveness itself becomes a kind of metaphor for Kroetsch’s view of the world; he prefers questions to answers, difficult questions to simple ones.

The metaphors are also a conveyance for themes and ideas as large as any being explored in Canadian fiction.

Alibi, according to Kroetsch, is his response to returning home to Alberta in 1976, after nearly two decades in the United States. By the mid-seventies, the dominant concerns of the pre-oil, pre-Lougheed west—the west of the 1940s and 50s—had been replaced by a gaudy materialism unknown to the author in his youth. That same materialism, with its tortured and fragmented hopes of putting the world in order—of collecting into manageable proportions—becomes in Alibi a pathetic monument to the diminishment and fragmentation of the human spirit: people separated from one another, people separated from themselves.

The events of the novel are set moving by a reclusive Alberta oil millionaire, Jack Deemer, whose eccentric passion is collecting everything collectible: shrunken heads, dominoes, ceremonial masks, suits of armour, stuffed animals, teeth, walking sticks, aphrodisiacs. These he stores in enormous warehouses.

Deemer is not a physical presence in the novel but a voice, a motivator—a kind of puppeteer who controls the stage without actually appearing on it. We get to know him only by reputation and by the actions and comments of the book’s other characters, several of whom represent him in one way or another.

The story’s protagonist and narrator is Deemer’s tenacious agent, William Dorfen, who has never met Deemer but on whom Deemer relies to do his collecting. “I was left alone to pursue assignments,” says Dorfen as the novel begins, “to travel, to dicker, to bribe if necessary…In sum I was a happy man. And I might have remained such, had Deemer not sent me that unfortunate message.”

The message comes in the form of a command: that Dorfen should find and purchase a spa to which the millionaire can retire.

Dorfen’s search for the curative waters of the spa becomes the book’s central motif, evolving gradually into a kind of allegorical quest for the way back to spiritual wholeness, to healing and belief.

The book takes Dorfen to England, Wales, Portugal and Greece—a geographical departure for Kroetsch, most of whose fiction to date has been set in western Canada. At least half the novel is set in Europe.

In searching out a refuge for his boss, Dorfen discovers, explores and, in a sense, resolves his own complex longing for refuge. Not that he gains his self-awareness through any sort of singular discovery or satori. True to the mythic structure on which the book is based, he achieves it through the search itself, the getting down, the getting dirty—the pain, both physical and psychological—that attend his Pilgrim-like progress. He is met in his travels by a number of painful impediments; he breaks a leg; he is scalded by steaming water; burned by the sun; buried by an avalanche (most of the book’s incidents, I might note, have a comic as well as a metaphoric edge). He also gets involved in two painfully pleasurable love affairs—one with an aggressive young filmmaker who is making a documentary about spas and whose search for the waters becomes a kind of running foil for Dorfen’s own; the second with a mysterious ex-mistress of Deemer’s, who Dorfen believes wants to kill him. He craves her regardless; and eventually it is she who dies, while Dorfen returns to Canada to find and reconstruct for Deemer the ideal spa. Dorfen healed becomes Dorfen the healer and in the end, ironically, Dorfen the killer.

Throughout the book, death is a quietly seductive presence—a dark shadowing of the desire in life for spiritual equanimity.

The most significant event (though hardly the subtlest) in Dorfen’s gradual evolution towards himself is his discovery of an ancient healing mud bath in Greece. Having immersed himself in the primal ooze—the highly symbolic ooze—he is embraced by dozens of afflicted and deformed human beings. The experience is a kind of culmination of his slow awakening both to himself and to his fellow human beings. To the need for contact. The pathway to wholeness, we are frequently reminded, is as much animal and sensual as spiritual, as much of the earth as of the air.

Of all the book’s character links, the one between Deemer and Dorfen, the observer and the participant, is the most intriguing. As the book proceeds, the relationship develops into a complex examination of the human capacities for passivity and action, for detachment and involvement (or from a literary perspective, the critical act and the creative).

Says Dorfen of his boss, “he thinks it’s his money and his silent manipulation that make the collection. Too bad for him is all I can say; it’s my scrounging and snooping and my talking, talking, talking that make his famous collection. Money is cheap. I’m the poor fool who must go out and dicker and plead and lie and cheat and swindle and count and pack and ship. The collection itself only confirms the discontinuity of this scattered world; it’s my talk that puts it together. I rave the world into coherence for Deemer.”

In raving the world into material coherence for his employer, Dorfen eventually raves it into spiritual coherence for himself.

My assessment of Alibi, I realize, reduces the novel rather sharply to its central themes and motifs. In reality, the novel is a multi-foliate tree of metaphor and imagery. So complex are the branches, in fact, that it is almost impossible at times to trace them to the trunk. Which is exactly as Kroetsch intends it. It is highly appropriate that the book’s structure is a kind of play on the detective genre. With Alibi, however, there is no single or simple solution to the book’s clues and mysteries. You can twist them and fiddle with them and ponder them; and in the end—like Dorfen’s own search for answers—it is the twisting and pondering themselves that count.

The novel is vigorous, irreverent and, in parts, very beautifully written. ■

Charles Wilkins writes fiction and contributes regularly to a number of magazines.