Lily and the Octopus

You try to kill me, we have business. You try to kill my dog, you die.

Isn't this great? In the book, Ted gets a tattoo of  Lily standing on the octopus' head and it took Mallory about three minutes to make me this awesome image. With her phone. 

Lily and the Octopus opens with Ted and his best friend Lily discussing cute boys – because that's what they do every Thursday (every Friday is games night, every Sunday: pizza) – and it immediately becomes apparent that Lily is a wiener dog (twelve years old, but eighty-four in dog years; old but not that old compared to Ted's two hundred and ninety-four [dog] years), and like all best friends, Lily is not only a good listener, but an excellent conversationalist. The following exchange – in which the titular octopus makes its first appearance on the second page – is representative of the book's tone:

It's not often you see an octopus up close, let alone in your living room, let alone perched on your dog's head like a birthday hat, so I'm immediately taken aback. I have a good view of it, as Lily and I are sitting on opposite sides of the couch, each with a pillow, me sitting Indian style, her perched more like the MGM lion.

“Lily!...What's that on your head?” I ask. Two of the octopus' arms hang down her face like chin straps.

“Where?”

“What do you mean, where? There. Over your temple on the right side.”

Lily pauses. She looks at me for a moment, our eyes locked on each other. She breaks my gaze only to glance upward at the octopus. “Oh. That.”

“Yes, that.”

(If it isn't apparent from that just what the octopus is, I'll try not to spoil it for anyone.) So, right from the start, this book is asking you to accept that Ted talks to Lily, and Lily talks back; but while Lily will answer questions about what she'd like to eat or which of the Ryans (Reynolds or Gosling) she prefers, it's not like she gets philosophical or answers questions that Ted can't possibly know the answers for: this is just a device, and insofar as it demonstrates how lonely and isolated Ted has become, it's a device that works well in the beginning (and besides, don't we all talk to our doggies, asking them questions and proceeding as though they've answered?) When Ted starts conversing directly with the octopus – and in a later extended passage, when he and Lily go on an epic sea voyage in order to bring the battle to the octopus in its own backyard – the device felt more gimmicky and less charming. It had me wondering if we're supposed to realise at this point that Ted is schizophrenic or otherwise delusional – and especially since both his therapist and his best human friend Trent never challenge his use of the word “octopus” – but when the next scene involves a crushing intrusion of reality, I enjoyed it more after the fact than during; Fishful Thinking, indeed. 

Most of this book takes place as interactions between Ted and Lily, but with a few flashback scenes, we grow to understand that after a bad breakup with his long-time partner Jeffrey, Ted has slowly cut himself off from the outside world (quitting his job to do freelance writing from home, no longer going east to visit his mother every summer, not fully engaging during first dates), and he has put himself in the dangerous position of investing most of his emotional energy in an aging dog; each of them now suffering from “Enclosed World Syndrome” (which, since it might be a madeup syndrome that the vet uses to explain the diminishing interests of dogs as they age, it doesn't sound healthy for a human man).

Somewhere, sometime, I stopped really living. I stopped really trying. And I don't understand why.

So, this is a book about a boy and his dog, yes, but it's also a thoughtful look at how easy it has become to cut ourselves off from human contact. So do I recommend Lily and the Octopus? I usually like to pass along doggy books to my mother-in-law (Marley and Me, The Art of Racing in the Rain), but I don't know if she'd like this one: and not because Ted is gay (it's a character trait no more important to the story than his eye colour; this isn't a gay story, it's a human story), and only partly because of the sporadic f-bombs (and while they seemed a bit jarring from this character, I can appreciate the emotions behind their use), but mostly, I don't know if she'd like the talking dog device; if she could accept the epic at-sea section as the fantasy of a man with dwindling options. For anyone who's willing to trust the author, Steven Rowley, to pull it all together, this is a worthwhile journey. And a final note: It has been nearly exactly a year since my own pup, Libby, lost her battle with an octopus – and that's both enough time and not nearly enough time to have pass before picking up a book like this; I am both toughened and wide-open vulnerable, and when I found myself bawling with fifty pages left, I had no idea how I'd go on. But I went on. We all go on.