Dog's Best Friend by Simon Garfield

Author:Simon Garfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2020-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Here was a dog as dogs used to be, London argues, before all the crossbreeding and pampering, and here was the dog truest to himself, triumphant in a hostile environment.

Hard to complain about the author’s narrative vigor, much as one may question his argument. Were domestic animals truly happier when free? The fact that the book still works more than a century later is testament to its self-belief, if nothing else. Its follow-up, White Fang, is equally vivid, its subject this time closer to a wolf than a dog, with its loyalty purely to itself. Both books stun with their ruthlessness; if you read them as a pup you will never forget them, such is their expeditionary force.

But where is the most memorable dog in all literature to be found? Some would make a case for J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, an exacting, obsessively scatological and pungently autobiographical account of the joys of living with his German shepherd Queenie. Ackerley, a novelist and editor, came late to the charms of dogs, once insisting “that a firm stand should be made against British sentimentality over dogs—dirty, noisy creatures.” Everything changed after falling for Queenie, who gave him the “incorruptible, uncritical devotion” he had desired all his life. “A dog has one aim in life,” Ackerley latterly surmised, “to bestow his heart.” And when she died he was beside himself, concluding “no human being has ever meant so much to me.”

Others would stake a modern and assertive claim for the Great Dane in The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, in which the narrator inherits a dog named Apollo after the suicide of her mentor and lover. (Obviously a dog such as this will transform a life; Apollo enjoys being read to, particularly Karl Ove Knausgaard.) And then there are many supporters of Karenin, the mutt in The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Karenin’s role is part baby substitute and part symbol of permanence in revolutionary times, and her death from cancer permits Kundera’s narrator to ponder that a society may be judged on its treatment of animals; the suggestion is that we too often fail this test. At the end of his life, the main female character, Tereza, has a “sacrilegious” thought: “The love that tied her to Karenin was better than the love between her and [her husband] Tomas. Better, not bigger. . . . Given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog, that oddity of human history probably unplanned by the Creator.”

I heartily recommend all of these dogs and their fictional, believable lives. But unfortunately I think the most memorable of all literary dogs is Bull’s-eye in Oliver Twist. Why unfortunately? Because the poor dog is a chained monster, and his owner, Bill Sikes, is cruel to him at every turn. Dickens still hadn’t owned a dog of his own by

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