Red Dog
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
No reader, regardless of age, will fail to be captivated by this charming story of a legendary dog, in Louis de Bernières’ Canadian publishing debut.
“In early 1998 I went to Perth in Western Australia in order to attend the literature festival, and part of the arrangement was that I should go to Karratha to do their first ever literary dinner. Karratha is a mining town a long way farther north. The landscape is extraordinary, being composed of vast heaps of dark red earth and rock poking out of the never-ending bush. I imagine that Mars must have a similar feel to it.
“I went exploring and discovered the bronze statue to Red Dog outside the town of Dampier. I felt straight away that I had to find out more about this splendid dog.
“A few months later I returned to Western Australia and spent two glorious weeks driving around collecting Red Dog stories and visiting the places that he knew, writing up the text as I went along. I hope my cat never finds out that I have written a story to celebrate the life of a dog.” – Louis de Bernières
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The best stories about animals are really stories about the people who form bonds with them, and therein lies the central fault of this extremely slender effort from the celebrated author of Corelli's Mandolin. Apparently, de Berni res was so taken with a statue of a sheepdog he found in an unnamed town in Australia that he had to uncover the sources that fed the local legend. He transformed them into this picaresque narrative, a series of tall tales, written in a self-consciously folksy style about the animal known variously as Red Dog, Tally Ho and Bluey. Because de Berni res anthropomorphizes him, Red Dog comes across as all too human, while the people who know and love him are mere stick figures; the author acknowledges he "invented" them and it shows. While the dog does possess an uncanny ability to make his wants and needs known (more probably, it's the uncanny predilection for humans to interpret the dog's various "communications"), these tall tales simply aren't tall enough. To be effective, the anecdotes that make up the book should be surprising, amazing or at the very least delightful, but Red Dog's adventures are mundane. The dog is clearly meant to evoke the pioneering Australian's conception of himself: independent, resourceful, footloose and stubborn. Red Dog is also prone to aggressive flatulence, presumably not an element of the Australian character. No doubt there was an Australian sheepdog that was well-loved by a circle that transcended a single family or even a town, but it's a stretch to turn that idea into a book, even one as slight as this one. Dog lovers might bite, but other readers should beware. The book is charmingly illustrated by Alan Baker, and includes a useful glossary of "Australianisms."
