With its appealing balance of empathy and irreverence and a touch so supple it could walk on water, Pastoral invites us to pose such questions as we wander a milieu brimming with ordinary foibles and just enough bucolic tranquillity to inspire even those of little faith to contemplate the sublime....This novel’s pleasures indeed include a rich sense of place, but that sense comes without sentimentality, and that place is something one might just as easily flee from as call home. Pastoral beauty is certainly on offer, but Alexis’ fluid, evocative descriptions of the rural wonders that surround Barrow are much more than nostalgia for a childhood idyll or mere reverie for revere’s sake — they constitute the very heart of Pastoral’s unresolved/unresolvable crisis of faith.

In a modern context, the pastoral, with its whole-hearted celebration of feeling the grass between one’s toes, feels dangerously earnest, even naïve. It’s easy to imagine a 21st-century take as nothing more than a rudimentary Blue Velvet for shepherds: revealing the darkness lurking just behind that rural tranquility. Avoiding this low-hanging fruit is what makes André Alexis’s Pastoral a refreshing and, ultimately, more rewarding piece of work. Rather than take easy shots at the genre, the Giller-shortlisted author and essayist tries to honestly transport it to (more or less) the present day.... So perhaps Alexis has further genre revivals on the horizon. If that’s the case, I’ll be ready for them, glossary in hand.