Books exploring the unique interactions between dogs and humans are flying off bookstore shelves – one of the most popular, Marley and Me, has become a Hollywood film starring a couple of A-listers. If aerobics was the craze of the eighties, renovating and celebrity cooking the obsessions of the nineties, then dog owning and loving would have to be the social trend of the noughties.
But most accounts focus on the ways in which dogs are little heroes who support our own struggles and help us to understand better our human selves and world. Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy is a whole other beast. While its central theme is the mutual dependence of human and dog, it explores this more profoundly than most books in the genre by asking the question: what if a human were to adapt to the world of dogs and not the other way around?
And it does so in a strong, suspense-filled narrative of many dimensions, one that creates touchable, smellable, visceral worlds that we explore through the eyes of both child and beast.
Four-year-old Romochka waits for his family in a condemned apartment in Moscow at the beginning of winter. Starving and cold, he finally leaves and walks the shabby indifferent streets. In the nick of time he meets the gentle, wise Mamochka, who leads him to her lair and adopts him into her clan.
In the gloomy, filthy basement of a ruined church he becomes one of her puppies, suckling at her teats and learning to speak an intricate language based on visual, aural and sensory cues. But even as he learns to track and mark trails and bemoans his tiny teeth and immobile ears, the human world of the nearby shanty town exerts on him an increasing fascination.
One of Hornung’s strengths here is the ease with which she blends narrative and theme. Romochka aches for some aspects of the human civilisation he has lost, but in some ways is closer to his own humanity as a member of a canine family.
Forced to live in survival mode, his human instincts and dexterity develop to a preternatural degree. And knowledge of the seasons is central to that survival: nature is never a site for contemplation but a beautiful landscape whose constant shifts must be endlessly renegotiated, and from whom Romochka is never detached:
Romochka stood in the empty lane in front of their lair and held his hands up to the white spring sky, pointing his fingers the way first leaves sprout from the buds.
Hornung shows us how human civilisation mutes our instincts. In doing this she makes a strong plea for our animal selves, as well as for the dignity and intrinsic worth of so-called animals. The novel aims to avoid sentimentalising Momochka and her family, and to sharpen our awareness of the animal world and its complex cultures: the dogs are clearly individuals with their own highly developed personalities. Hornung has said that when the human elements of the story come into play she wants them to jar – and they do.
The book is in many ways a clear-eyed account of appalling social injustice, posing an uncomfortable critique of that civilisation. In Hornung’s Moscow obscene poverty and homelessness are so institutionalised that the ‘bomzhi’ are abjected, regularly hauled off like so much rubbish by the compassion-free militzia, their shanty towns destroyed, to keep the streets ‘clean’.
The contemptuous attitudes of officials to both homeless adults and what is a lost generation of children might in other hands read like didacticism, and Hornung has actively protested the plight of refugees in Australia, as well as dealt with the theme in her work. But here she is a recording angel, refusing to condemn. However, it’s impossible not to contrast this social disintegration with the unstinting love of Mamochka, who rules her lair with an iron paw in a hairy glove, and at a crucial time provides a priceless gift for her adopted son.
Another of Hornung’s strengths is the deftness with which she handles the fantasy elements of the novel. Hornung has said that the initial idea came from a true story of a boy in Moscow living with dogs for two years, and she has also drawn on the myth of Romulus and Remus. For this reader at least, traces of other fairytales waft lightly through the narrative.
But these elements rarely take over its trenchant realism; instead, Hornung deepens our understanding of reality by asking us to incorporate the mythic and fantastic into it. Her two scientist characters, Natalya and Dmitry, while well-meaning, are stymied by their scientific training in their attempts to understand Romochka.
Indeed the book’s realism has been acclaimed by critics, and rightly so. Hornung’s Moscow is vividly realised, a place where the metro system’s vast underground caverns are stashed with the city's multitudes, where ruthless begging rings impose their own hierarchies and feral children fiercely guard their territories. Hornung learned Russian and visited Moscow in order to fully enter the world she was creating, and this intimate knowledge is evident in the grittiness of the writing.
The book is also packed with narrative drive, all the more dexterous given that there is very little dialogue in the first half. Hornung skillfully describes the intricacies of wordless communication, and the regimented, precarious, ever-changing nature of life as a clan dog in the city. Romochka has countless adventures and misadventures that provide insights into the underground social structures of a post-communist megalopolis.
The novel is solidly grounded in research on dog and human behaviour, but Hornung ably demonstrates how important imagination is in reaching another kind of truth. The interactions she imagines between Romochka and his adopted family are always beautifully embodied, earthed in Romochka’s need for warmth, food and love:
After a while his hands warmed up and he reached for her damp belly and stroked her with his fingers as he drank … She sighed and laid down her head.
And indeed, if were to use our imaginations more, wouldn’t we feel greater compassion for both humans and animals?
The questions Hornung asks in this novel are not meant to comfort but to prod. Does our abjection of animals enable our oppression of other humans? Are we really more savage than the beasts? What have we lost in forming our identities against our conceptions of the animal world? And how might the world change if we chose to engage in that liminal space that so fascinates Hornung, ‘the hour between dog and wolf’?
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