DOGS! DOGS! DOGS!

The following appeared in the Record Review in April, 2004 as another in Elinore Standard's ongoing "My Reading Life" column.

Works mentioned in this piece: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Catcher in the Rye, Dog Fighter, Incredible Journey.


DOGS! DOGS! DOGS!


I am spacing out the chapters, dragging my feet, not wanting to finish Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, “Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight” (Random House, 2001). It is the story of her girlhood on various remote farms in post-Colonial, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe Nyasaland/Malawi and Northern Rhodesia/Zambia. and Fuller has taken me right there with her, as part of her unruly, unprotected life.

During the 1970s and 80’s, the parts of these countries Fuller’s parents inhabited were geographically and physically inhospitable, and to hard-luck white farmers, scratching an existence out of tick-bitten cattle and low-grade tobacco in remote places, it was also dangerous. Land mines and trigger-happy juvenile soldiers were among the outside hazards sometimes too fantastic to take seriously when everyday life was so full of its own pressing danger.

While it instructs the reader about the contemporary geopolitical realities of region, Fuller’s book is as much the story of her alcoholic, bi-polar mother, a gorgeous, overburdened farmwife, horsewoman, barefoot doctor and veterinarian, big reader and major dog-lover. Somehow, Fuller writes about this amazing character with affection and candor. Both parents were racists as were most whites during that time and in that place. They were the “bosses”, yet they were dependent on local people for practically everything, including security, during long years of civil war and general upheaval. Of herself, Fuller says, “I am African by accident, not by birth. So while soul and heart, and the bent of my mind are African, my skin blaringly begs to differ and is resolutely white.”

As you go through Fuller’s chaotic childhood with her, you wonder how anybody in that family ever survived in the thick, swampy lands where they settled. And the fact is, three didn’t. Three of the Fuller children died early: one a baby, of meningitis, the next a toddler, by drowning, the third at birth. Nicola Fuller blamed the deaths of her children on “bloody Africa” and this rage and sorrow helped drive her mad. “All of us are mad, but I’m the only one with a certificate to prove it,” she observes.

Alexandra, “Bobo”, and her older sister, Vanessa, “Van”, accepted Nicola’s emotional peaks and troughs and despite Nicola;s haphazard parenting and the gruffness of their quixotic father, the sisters seemed to have managed the resilience needed to withstand the general craziness and ever-present danger surrounding them.

The book takes its title from lines by A.P. Herbert:
“Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight,
For mother will be there.”

“The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time” is about a whole lot more than a curious incident. The narrator of Mark Haddon’s first novel (Doubleday paper (2003) is Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old autistic savant who calms himself by doing advanced mathematics in his head. Christopher’s compulsive everyday behavior is usually so impossible it would drive a saint crazy. People who come in contact with him lose patience and their own loss of control triggers Christopher’s fear-driven violence.

Haddon understands exactly how Christopher’s mind works and the unique point of view he produces is so realistic and elaborately interior, it makes you marvel at Haddon’s capacity for empathy. In addition to his clever line drawings, Haddon includes simple and complicated math problems (with solutions) and, best of all, he lays out on a simple grid an clear way to determine prime numbers. After you read “Curious Incident” prime numbers need never again be a mystery!

Were it not for the occasional strong language, “Curious Incident” could easily replace the overtired “Catcher in the Rye” as required reading in the high school curriculum. Some schools will be brave enough to adopt it and the book’s real concerns about loyalty, honesty, tolerance, and equality will provide a platform for interesting classroom and reading group discussion.

You know the saying, “I wouldn’t wear it to a dog fight”? Two dogs fighting each other is troubling enough to watch but think about a dog fighting a man when the fight is to the death. Vicious. And people watch and make bets and cheer. This is outlawed cockfighting carried to an extreme -- and what, exactly, do you wear? The young women at the fights in Marc Bojanowski’s “The Dog Fighter” (Harper, 2004) wear dresses and pearls and they smell good, and they attend as ornaments, hanging on the arms of powerful men.

Set in Baja Mexico during the 1940s, this disturbing and brutal first novel introduces characters who could be described as “evil” if that word weren’t recently so degraded. The narrator, a dog fighter, writes about his life looking back over many years, and uses choppy sentence fragments, run-on sentences, misspellings, and he makes all the mistakes in grammar and usage made by a badly-educated, inexperienced, but talented and articulate writer. Reading this book requires effort. The reader gets stalled, has to re-read, and often has to stop and interpret the meaning. Occasionally, it requires paging back to sort out characters and events. Some readers will have no patience with this kind of annoyance but after finishing sixty pages or so, I found I was into it and had gotten used to the narrator’s voice.

The unsatisfying ending confounds the reader and leaves her wondering what, exactly, happened. I stuck with this book, often compelled by its brutality. I won’t go back to figure out the ending. Enough is enough.

I admire the confidence and daring of this first-time novelist and it will be interesting to see what critics say about Bojanowski when the book is formally published in August, 2004.
Enough is also enough with “The Dogs of Babel” a first novel by Carolyn Parkhurst (Time Warner, 2003). A beloved wife climbs to the top of a backyard tree and falls/jumps. She leaves behind signs and symbols that will help her grieving husband unravel the mystery of her death. He decides to teach the family dog, Lorelei, the only witness to the accident, to talk. There is a lot in here about real experiments with talking dogs, some involving appalling cruelty (see “Dog Fighter” for more animal cruelty) to the animals. The husband toils along with flash cards, and so on. Dear me. Poor Lorelei. Call the Humane Society.

So much for a spate of reading on a single topic: such an artificial and hokey effort is bound to produce disappointment. It did bring me to “Let’s Go to The Dogs Tonight,” an experience well worth plugging away for. If you want a real dog story, go read “The Incredible Journey.”


Elinore Standard is the co-editor with Laura Furman of "Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading" (Carroll & Graf, 1997.)