When I was in Canada, one of the books I was looking out for was Wild Dogs (2004) by Helen Humphreys. I believe she has only written two novels set in contemporary Canada, and that was precisely the sort of novel I was on the hunt for. Having really admired her memoir Nocturne and novel Rabbit Foot Bill, I was keen to complete a trio. Even better, the copy I found in the basement of a bookshop in Inglewood, Calgary, was signed! I got to reading it pretty quickly, drawn in by these excellent opening paragraphs:
The wild dogs roam the summer fields just outside of town. Their eyes flash, bright stars in the woods at night and they weave like fire through the dry grass towards the edge of the city, looking for something to kill and eat.
Love is like those wild dogs. If it hunts you down, it will not let you go. And what you can never know from the beginning is how hard or how long you’ll love something; how even when it has gone the love you felt will still chase you down, loping like dark flame through your blood.
The wild dogs are real. They are out there, beyond the safety of the streets and houses, beyond the lights of the city. And one of those wild dogs is mine.
Alice’s dog is one of several in the neighbourhood who has turned wild, with surprising rapidity. Every night, she and five other people congregate at the edge of the forest, trying to call their dogs home. They proffer toys, food, affection – and every night, they are rejected. Or perhaps they don’t even see the dogs in the distance.
It is a brilliantly arresting image for a novel to open with, and apparently based loosely on a real event. It also gives Humphreys a ready-made community of unlikely companions, which is an excellent way to organise an intriguing novel. There is a man called Malcolm who lives with his mother – perhaps. A teenager, Jamie, who avoids home because of an angry stepfather. Lily, in her 20s, who has suffered brain damage. Walter, an older man whose Jack Russell terrier has somehow joined the pack of larger dogs. And there is the person that the narrator addresses as ‘you’, with whom (as we learn in a narrative that gently plays outside of time) Alice has had a love affair. That is, it happens after the events being narrated, and has ended by the time the narrator is looking back.
Another dimension to the novel: most of these dogs have not escaped. In almost every case, there is someone who has deliberately taken the dog to the forest’s edge and let it loose – whether as punishment, or because they don’t want a dog near their baby, or they don’t think the owner is capable of having a dog. In Alice’s case, it is her boyfriend who abandoned her dog there – from a mix of anger of hopelessness. Somehow, this is not the immediate death knell to their relationship – though it comes pretty soon. And so the book charts the bonding of these disparate people, their shared and yet separate hopes, and the evolution of Alice’s affections for the mysterious ‘you’.
I think it’s a very clever arrangement for a novel. The only bit that felt heavy-handedly ‘novelistic’ was when they take turns walking the usual dog-walk routes of each dog – supposedly to feel closer to the dogs, but really a slightly clumsy way of taking the six to different places together. And I wondered quite where the novel could go, formally – and I was surprised when Alice’s narrative ended. And, instead, we turn to Jamie’s perspective, about halfway through the novel. It gives Humphreys an opportunity to write a really moving, sharp, uncomfortable account of what it’s like to live with somebody violent. Somebody unpredictable, and yet somebody you have to desperately try to predict.
It’s fifteen steps from the back door to the fridge. If I pull the fridge door back against the hinge, it will open without a sound. The bread wrapper will crinkle. Yogurt makes that suction scoop when you pull the foil top off. The cheese drawer sticks on its runners. Peanut butter will be all right. I can twist the plastic cap off slowly and it won’t make any noise. I can stand here at the fridge and shove my fingers into the jar instead of risking the rustle of the cutlery drawer.
It’s not the final shift in narrator – and, as well as various members of our six, we spend time with another character who is involved in the novel’s shocking, and yet somehow inevitable, twist.
In another Humphreys book I bought and read in Canada – And A Dog Called Fig,her memoir of writing and dogs – she writes about the genesis of Wild Dogs:
When I was thinking up my next novel, Wild Dogs, I decided to structure it after the way that a dog turns and turns before settling to sleep. I wanted the story to turn like that, to circle back on itself and then continue before coming to rest. The novel is about dogs, or rather it is about our relationship with dogs, about wildness and domesticity and belonging.
I don’t think I would have ever have guessed that was the origin, but I can definitely see what she means. When the perspective shifts, it doesn’t go back to the beginning of the story – but it does take a few steps back. And it does come to a sort of rest – though I must warn sensitive readers that not all the dogs in the novel survive.
In those opening paragraphs that struck me so much, I did have some qualms that the metaphors would be too strident and the comparison between human relationships and wild dogs a little too pointed. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Humphreys is a subtle writer for the most part, and manages to swerve anything too heavy-handed. And yet it is, as she says, a novel about wildness and domesticity and belonging. It also does that very hard thing: taking a striking opening scenario, and making the rest of the novel equally compelling. The energy doesn’t fizzle out, but it becomes something more immersive, more telling. Yes, even this cat person loved it.