A doghouse implies a dog, and a dog implies a master. The identity of the dog is clear enough -- I was the dog. But who was the master?The Dog by Joseph O'Neill is an ambitious critique of humanity and the edifices that we construct to keep each other at a distance. Appropriately enough, the book itself might be considered one such construction, as every reversion to French and German (even if the main character is half Swiss) and every parenthetical digression -- although purporting to dig down to deeper revelations -- primarily served to create barriers between the reader and understanding. An example:
(His "don't know" comes out as "døn't knøw". For all his devotion to mumbling and drawling, the kid has this fancy English-Norwegian accent that must be, I guess, a payoff of his expensive schooling in England. (I like it just fine. ( That said, I have a real soft spot for the habitual accent of Arab speakers of good English, in whose mouths the language, imbued with grave trills, can seem weighted with the sagacity of the East. (See Alec Guiness in Laurence of Arabia.))))I chose that passage because it was mercifully short, but this bracket-stacking sometimes ran to a page or more, and more than once, culminated in six end-brackets)))))). The device grew wearisome but I'll accept it as both illustrative of this notion of edifice building and also as an insight into the mind of the main character (only named, reluctantly, as X), who as a corporate lawyer, also organises his thoughts into lists and clauses, subclauses and definitions of terms. And so to "X": after the nasty breakup of a non-marriage with the non-Jenn (who couldn't have been the actual Jenn he had once known and loved), our protagonist accepts a job as Family Officer for an obscenely wealthy Lebanese family; a job consisting of literally rubber-stamping their wishes, which necessitates a move to tax-friendly Dubai. When the structure of The Dog takes a break from soul-searching and allows for a bit of plot and scene-setting, the description of Dubai and life for the ex-pats who find themselves working there is fascinating.
The city could not have more resembled a fata morgana -- and that was the whole idea. If I might psychologize, the whole reliance on the mirage/wonder equation, which of course has an etymological basis, is not just a marketing ploy; it is a secret revenge on the mirage itself, and only one facet of the Dubaian counterattack on the natural. The crimes of nature against man, in this part of the world, are not restricted to the immemorial mockery of the visual sense. The slightest effort of reflection must yield an awareness of the suffering and lowliness that these barren and desolate sands have without cease inflicted on their human inhabitants; and it cannot be a surprise, now that the shoe is on the other foot, that the transformation of this place is characterized by attempts at domination directed not only against the heat and dust but, as is evident from the natives' somewhat irrational hostility to solar energy and their unusual dedication to the artificial settlement of marine areas, against the very sun and the very sea.
And so X finds himself living a non-life, working a non-job, in a mirage of a city, and not willing to create unfair expectations within a relationship again, his needs are satisfied by Pasha (a high-tech massage chair), non-exploitative porn (he especially prefers amateur films made by married couples), and when necessary, by contacting a madam who sets him up with women who, X is assured, are non-prostitutes; simply happy-good-time tourists looking for some extra spending money. When an acquaintance goes missing, X haunts his facebook page, fascinated by the shadow life that can be lived online, regarding facebook as a second chance, with new friends; a rewriting of the record; as a festival of mutual absolution. Absolution -- and the transcendence of edifice -- is important to X:
Uno, it's a somewhat disagreeable reality that conscience, at root, is no more than a productive biological sensitivity to the reciprocity that is essential to our specific survival. The sense of fairness familiar to all societies has come to us from and because of the apish age of literal back-scratching. Due, that a life in which an honest attempt is made to transcend the original quid pro quo is a life that has a shot at glory.To this end, as X understands he lives at the top of a highly disparate society, he makes automatic charitable contributions to humanitarian agencies that purport to help out the hard-used undocumented foreigners who construct the highrises -- the fata morgana that is Dubai -- and chases down aghast chambermaids, attempting to tip them. But when he convinces his employers to set up a charitable foundation, and later learns that it is used to launder money, it's his own name that's tied to the crime. So much for glory. And so to return to the original question: If X senses he lives in a doghouse -- that he is the dog -- then who is the master? Society? Apish impulses? His job? The answer comes near the end, as X considers Conrad Black and his fall from grace and eventual incarceration:
Maybe I'm perverse, but I connect imprisonment to a limit of culpability. It's certainly true that, so long as he's inside, he can hardly be punished more.So we create our own doghouse? It's just one more edifice? And that makes us dog and master both? Or is that one more illusion? The Dog is quite interesting, modern and timely, but a very frustrating read. I won't say I loved this book but need to give it four stars for its construction (which is how I felt about so many of the longlisted titles for this year's Man Booker Prize). As a final illustration, is the following brilliant or nonsensical?
To judge from Mr. Ponting's astounding black-and-white images, this sphere of land-ice and sea-ice and air-ice, so-called Antarctica, is barely a place at all but, rather, an enormous and enormously weird natural activity, so that the spectacle of this doughty, three-masted silhouette trying to get somewhere seems multiply fallacious, as if an attempt were being made to sail a shadow into a hubbub, audible only in the form of coldness, emanating from sources that are not a whereabouts.
