Dogs, Ducks and Daemons

I’ve been catching up on my reading recently. At long last I’ve done what I’ve been promising myself for a good long while by picking up Courtney’s copies of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman is an absolutely spellbinding storyteller. I devoured the first two in about three or four days, but I underestimated how much reading I’d get done on holiday and left the Amber Spyglass at home. They’ve been reviewed and talked about so much that I’ve got nothing new to bring to the discussion, other than to say I was mightily pissed off at the end of the second book, and that I’d almost forgotten how satisfying non-realist, non-modernist, non-postmodern narratives can be.

Then I read another that everyone is talking about back home, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. James brought it over for Courtney. It’s a quick read (a quiet Sunday should get you through the bulk of it). What struck me is that it’s essentially a kitchen-sink drama (and, yes, a detective story) transformed by being told through the eyes of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome. This is the book’s greatest achievement. By handing over the narration to the protagonist the illogic of his autistic behaviour is revealed to be very structured, patterned and motivated. The formalists aimed to create art that gave the spectator the chance to look at everyday life from a different perspective, and the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time does exactly that without feeling either gimmicky or worthy. If I were in a position to make such decisions I’d declare it required reading in high schools.

A good comprehensive review is onThe Modern Word, which is a thoroughly decent website.

Yesterday I read a novella by Mikhail Bulgakov called Heart of a Dog. A Russian scientist takes a stray dog and replaces his pituitary gland and seminary vesicles with those of a human. Over the course of a few days the perfectly adequate dog turns into an utterly deplorable man. Clearly it’s not a scientific record, but a work of political satire. I wonder what it is with political satire and anthropomorphism? Bulgakov wrote the book in 1925, but it wasn’t published in his native Russia until 1987. I don’t know when his work was translated into English and whether or not Bulgakov, who died in 1940, had any influence on George Orwell. Either way it’s an odd book, and feels a little like the Ibsen play the Wild Duck, which I found very odd and very satisfying. In fact, the two playwrights shared a creative milieu; both had works produced at the Moscow Arts Theatre by Stanislavsky, and Bulgakov spent time there as a producer. I think I’m starting to understand.

And tonight I’ll be cracking open the final volume of His Dark Materials. I already had a quick peek at the preface: an excerpt from a Robert Grant hymn, a few lines of Rainer Maria Rilke and a chunk of John Ashbery. Best of all the first page opens with a line of Blake. Honestly, the trash they give kids to read these days makes me sick.