In her first novel, Annabel Lyon brilliantly re-imagines the real-life teacher/student relationship between Aristotle and a 13-year-old boy who would soon transform the world as Alexander the Great.

The novel opens with Aristotle taking his wife and nephew to Pella, capital of Macedon. By the end of the first chapter, Aristotle encounters the young Alexander and learns that he is to become the boy’s tutor. The novel’s five-chapter structure is meant to remind us of the acts of a play, but it also acts as a classical rhetorical construct designed to persuade the reader, “winning the soul through discourse.”

Lyon depicts Alexander as a bright, ostensibly rough-and-tumble teenager who must be physically trained for leadership and war, yet who is also internally frail and lonely. There is a tension between the public face Alexander puts on and the “different boy” Aristotle sees in their private sessions, who is “tense, intense . . . angry, curious, pompous, charming, driven.” For his part, Aristotle confesses, “I love to be on the inside, the backside, the underside of anything, and see the usually unseen.”

Over the next six years, the worlds of this man and boy collide, combine, oppose, and complement each other. Aristotle’s narrative expands to include brief, delightfully realized diversions into history, biology, science, literature, medicine, politics, and philosophy.  The novel is full of vivid descriptions and impressive imagery, as in Aristotle’s description of the season’s first snow, which “comes whispering late one gray evening….  It seems to fall from nowhere, bits of pure colourlessness peeled off from the sky and drifting down, thicker now.”

Lyon’s singular gifts for description, character development, and plotting are on full display here, informing her unique and creative story. The novel is deep and rich in thought and accomplishment, yet it reads with the calming ease and influence of a cool summer breeze.

Monique Proulx’s work might best be described as curiously flawed fiction filled with prose of inflated exuberance. Wildlives, her new novel, is no exception.

With each new chapter we are gradually introduced to a densely packed landscape of contradictions (variously described either as an abyss or a paradise), as well as a wide array of its inhabitants, whose foreboding present and past lives are to be played out in the coming chapters.

At the heart of all this is Lila Szach, part landowner/matriarch and part “sorceress.” Claire (brief lover of Jim, the black nurseryman who brings her flowers and compost) is a writer who, curiously, is putting together the pieces of a story much like the one we’re reading. Jeremie is a child obsessed with Harry Potter. Simon (Jeremie’s uncle and Lila’s young lover) comes to the aid of Violette, a victim of breast cancer, whose story “landed so powerfully on Simon that he lost the power of speech.”

Standard semi-exotic stuff so far, as interior lives and exterior landscapes modify each other and vie for the reader’s attention. There is the requisite darkness revealed in slow stages, personal histories and agonies to be resolved, and a looming, unseen threat that might bring further challenges, pain, and suffering to both the innocent and the guilty. To Proulx’s credit, she admirably balances much of this complex layering of multiple characters, setting, and storyline. It’s a clever high-wire act of structural equilibrium that we have to respect for what it dares to attempt.

Unfortunately, what too often brings the novel crashing to the ground is an annoyingly dense and purple prose style that mistakes volume for creative clarity, overdone imagery and metaphors for depth of insight. The accumulating weight of Proulx’s diction achieves a kind of verbal clutter, and inevitably distracts the reader from the story and its characters. We can’t see or feel them inside this thick coating of words, which pushes us away rather than inviting us into its core. It’s a use of language that valiantly reaches for a spiritual and psychological transformation, but falls short.