And then, Steve said, then this policeman goes No. You do not go. There is nothing for you there. There, even the dogs are dead. Ant shuffled across the floor, rolled up Steve’s sleeve, and looped a belt around his arm. Steve watched him. Even the bloody dogs, he said, shaking his head.
Even the Dogs is kind of a perfect book to be reading in Covid-19 self-isolation: I've been thinking lately about those invisible people in the community – the unhoused, the drug addicts, the sex workers – and wondering how they're making out: Is social distancing even possible? Have the empty sidewalks eliminated the drop of a few coins in an outreached cup? Have the closed borders dried up the illegal drug supply? I feel so fortunate to be in Canada (today and always) because of our social safety nets, but I know that folks who didn't officially claim income last year don't qualify for relief payments, and with reductions in the workforce overall, I have no idea what face-to-face services are still available to our most vulnerable neighbours. Originally released in 2010 (for which it won 2012's International Dublin Literary Award) and about to be rereleased in May of 2020, Jon McGregor's Even the Dogs insists that we look directly at these invisible people, now and always; to recognise their humanity and afford them dignity. Told in an engagingly disjointed and surreal style, in language ugly-beautiful, this is the type of storytelling that always appeals to me; reading this particular narrative during self-isolation was perfectly satisfying. (Thank you to Catapult and Soft Skull Press for my review copy of #eventhedogs )
They break down the door at the end of December and carry the body away.
And thusly does Even the Dogs open with a bit of a mystery – there is a body, unnamed observers, a chaotic timeline in which the past and the present intermingle – and as tangled events start to unravel themselves, we realise that this story is being told by some sort of chorus; though whether they be a chorus of ghosts, shadows, or memory incarnate remains to be seen. We do understand that this chorus is omniscient and timeless, and as the narrative flits among a web of marginalised people, in the present and the past, we learn that whoever they are, the storytellers have a kind of love for the person that once inhabited the body.
They don’t speak. They wait. They look at the body. We all crowd into the room and look at the body. The swollen and softening skin, the sunken gaze, the oily pool of fluids spreading across the floor. The twitch and crawl of newly hatched life, feeding.
The scene expands and rewinds and the story introduces a host of invisible people – mostly homeless, mostly drug users – and in language gritty and unsentimental, we will eventually learn what brought these people to the city; what made them first turn to heroin (there are quite a few ex-soldiers, people who first self-medicated to stop physical and mental pain; there are also foster care survivors, and middle class dropouts); as well as descriptions of their daily grind:
Getting a bag and then finding somewhere to go to cook it up in a spoon and dig it into your arm or your leg or that mighty old femoral vein down in between your thighs. The water and the brown and the citric, waiting for it all to dissolve, holding up the flame while those tiny bubbles pop and then drawing it up through the filter and the needle into the syringe. And waiting again for the gear to cool down. Sitting with someone you’ve only just met, in a rib-roofed room with a gaping hole where the window should be, the floor littered with broken tiles and bricks, in a building you can’t remember the way out of. Tightening off the strap and waiting for the vein to come up. This bloke you’ve only just met passing you the loaded syringe. Smacking at your mottled skin and waiting for the vein to come up. Pinching and pulling and poking around and waiting for the vein to come up and then easing the needle in, drawing back a tiny bloom of blood before gently pushing the gear back home.
Without criticising the sincerity of the frontline outreach workers, McGregor tells a story in which drug addicts know how to game the system and don't want anything more from these workers than continued access to welfare payments and methadone. All of the characters in this story, even though working hard against their best interests, will say they are doing exactly as they like. But although they tend to congregate in groups – pooling resources to score, helping each other find viable veins, seeking shelter in the apartment of the man who will die – these are incredibly lonely people: trying to tell their story to anyone who'll listen; craving the touch of the volunteer hairdresser who visits the day program; the chorus watching greedily as the dead man's filthy body is scrubbed for his autopsy. And if you can't get the feelings that you crave, it would be better to feel nothing at all:
Do anything to get back to that. Keep getting back up to get back to that feeling well again. Feeling well, feeling sorted, feeling like all the, the worries have been taken away. The fears. All the emotions taken care of. That feeling of, what is it, just, like, absence, from the world. Like taking your own life away, just for a while. Like what the French call it la, the little death. And then getting up and doing it again, every time. We get up, and we do it all over again.
What else can we do.
There are several just incredible scenes where the jumbled timelines provide a bigger picture than a straight narrative would have done – in particular, we watch as a soldier in Afghanistan loses his foot to an IED, and as he is carried to safety and medical help via helicopter, we also see the entire low-tech process of how heroin is derived from poppies (and how it is then dispersed throughout the world, and even to this man's own eventual cohort) – and even these large chunks of prose that I've included in my review can't possibly give a sense of the storytelling magic that McGregor achieves with Even the Dogs. This is exactly the sort of thing I like, and coming as it did just at the right moment for me to connect with, I'm rounding up to full stars.
