My first dog was a Scottish Terrier named Ukko (after an old Finnish God – the God of Thunder and also the Supreme God [1]). Brought from Eastern Finland to Helsinki in 1993. As a puppy, he had a penchant for eating the insides of my shoes. Must have been due to my natural, vibrant scent. Otherwise, like all terriers, he was a fearless creature and built like a tank.
Sadly, Ukko had a congenital heart disease which ended his life twelve years later. At the time of death he was residing at my mother-in-law’s in order for her not to feel too lonely after recently losing her husband (and my FIL). One afternoon, Ukko was found lying lifeless underneath MIL’s living room table. I have often thought about his last moments. What was it like? And why, why wasn’t I there? That was my responsibility; I was his master. I let him down.
I do recall borrowing the Finnish version of The Plague Dogs (Ruttokoirat, the title does translate directly) in the early 80s from my local library but I didn’t finish it then. It was too heavy.
I bought a secondhand paperback sometime in the 90s, read it in early 2000s and again now. Now, The Plague Dogs is not another Watership Down. While the life and death of rabbits is depicted realistically and the antagonist, General Woundwort, is a one cruel SOB (his Efrafa is a totalitarian society), Watership Down deep down is a fable: something that you can read to your children. The Plague Dogs, in contrast, is a treatise on the evilness of human, and a depiction of purgatory. There is even an ex-Nazi scientist in the book, and he is not the most evil one. Purgatory, as it happens, is situated in the breathtakingly beautiful Lake District in Cumbria, England.
The book opens with a depiction of the end of a cruel experiment in a facility in the Lake District called Animal Research (Scientific and Experimental) or A.R.S.E. (The Fast Show did the joke better [2]). One of our two protagonists, Rowf, a black mongrel, is subjected to a test of survival by whitecoats, ie, scientists. He has been tossed into a pool to see how long he can manage to stay afloat and how does he fare compared to previous experiments. This is science: charts will be updated, theories posited. But really it is pure torture the only point of which is cruelty. After an hours-long struggle Rowf is lying vertically on the pool with his muzzle barely above the surface. Then he starts to drown. Only when Rowf’s lifeless body has drifted to the bottom of the pool, is he rescued by grabbing him from the collar by a hook. Rowf is then recussitated and tossed back into his cage. To be continued until and he plateaus and cannot be reviwed anymore or the Evil loses its interest in this kind of torture.
Rowf’s neighbour is a Fox Terrier named Snitter. He was a subject of an experimental surgery where he was lobotomised to blur the line between objective and subjective. Snitter, at times, rambles a lot because his hallucinations seem real and the real world unreal. (I’ve always hoped that both of these ‘scientific’ experiments were merely a figment in Mr Adams’s imagination.)
Snitter had had a master, who had an accident of which Snitter blames himself (not without merit). Rowf has never had one. They are an odd couple.
The grace of God – or the lure of the local pub on a Friday afternoon – makes their caretaker act sloppy. The dogs escape from their dwellings thanks to a loose wire between their pens and a poorly fastened door on Rowf’s pen. They then search for a way to the outside world – which they both can hear and smell – while moving inside the bowels of A.R.S.E. They see other animals, such as rats, in cages and reminisce some of their fallen comrades and the tests they were subjected to.
They do find their way out, eventually, via a furnace and a chute. The furnace is used to burn medical equipment and dead test animals. When Rowf and Snitter emerge from the chute with their last strength they are out in the green English countryside. Is it a proper escape or do they enter a purgatory? Was the chute a gateway to or from hell?
A dog has to have a master if he’s going to live properly.
Rowf and Snitter are no wild animals. Their understanding of the world is extremely limited. Where are all the roads and houses? Has man taken them away and left them with rocks and grass?
Somehow they are able to survive their initial time in the Cumbrian wilderness. First by scavenging until Rowf manages to kill a sheep through luck and sheer brutal effort.
Ah’ve seen nowt dafter, th’ pair of yez, lyin’ flat oot o’ th’ fell like wee piggies full o’ grub, like there wez neether dergs nor shepherd aboot. Ye fells th’ yow, bolts it doon ye, kips ye doon a spell an’ comes back like a pair o’ squallin’ cubs. Ye took ne heed at aall o’ shepherd’s gun or dergs. Ah’d think shame o’ ye, ye pair o’ daft nowts.
Enter Tod, a fox. He and other locals (humans & dogs) speak in strong rural Upper Tyneside (Geordie) accent – that was already diluted somewhat in my 1978 American paperback. It doesn’t make it any easier to understand without silently pronouncing the words and consulting a Geordie-English glossary in the beginning of the book.
Elmore Leonard was right, though, in his rule 7 of 10 rules for writing [2]:
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop.
It may slow down the reader considerably, or even stop the journey completely.
With Tod’s help the posse is able to hunt effectively and keep themselves out of human sight.
However, sheep are missing and found dead and eaten. The local sheep owners get anxious for a reason.
“…some buildy beeäst or other livin’ oop there” (a diaresis to denote that a vowel is pronounced as a separate syllable, nice).
There are inquiries to A.R.S.E. about missing dogs. A.R.S.E. denies everything even though then do have two missing dogs and no idea how they escaped from the facility.
Digby Driver is a member of the Fourth Estate. A scrupulous person who has found his calling in The London Orator – clearly modelled after a tabloid like the Sun or the Daily Mail. Mr Driver is always looking for the next big story as is his job and the dogs rummaging aroung the Lake District is that. He discovers through a combination, tenacity and many offered rounds of pints in the local pub that yes, there are two dogs missing from A.R.S.E. and that there are also top secret research done for the Ministry of Defence and, eventually, that the research is done by an ex-nazi.
After hunting down the ex-nazi he finds out the purpose of the research: study of bubonic plague using fleas and rats. Furthermore, he bends reality to his own will – the unfortunate mark of a successful tabloid journalist –, by writing that there is a chance that the dogs could have had contact with those laboratory (they didn’t). Ergo: The Plague Dogs moniker. Ergo: panic.
From this point of view the the noose tightens around Rowf and Snitter. The human plane of existence gets involved, either voluntary (Digby Driver and The London Orator in the pursuit of circulation a.k.a. money; Opposition in pursuit of power) or involuntary (A.R.S.E; Government).
But what really seals the fate of Rowf and Snitter is a series a two unfortunate accidents, both resulting in the death of a human. It is the combination of seedy tabloid journalism, political overreaction, false pride (the second death in the book) and the cold human desire to get rid of messy or unwanted things, whether they be natural or unnatural.
The purgatory culminates in the Irish Sea. For Rowf the Serially Drowned it is the ultimate horror and punishment but he persists. For Snitter the Mixer of Subjective and Objective it is just another phase or leg or their journey. Nevertheless, even though the dogs couldn’t really be further apart from each other (A.R.S.E excepting) they have travelled, experienced and worked together. They will continue to do so, to the end.
Spoilers.
In the end we enter the realm of Schrödinder’s Dogs.
I can clearly see where the book’s real ending is. Words written after that are due to the publisher not wanting the original ending. We are treated first with a colloquy between the author and the reader where the reader wants some “miraculous breeze” in the “dark Stygian waters” and then the epilogue which goes meta by using real persons and referring even to the author itself.
I’m willing to believe that Richard Adams left the literary quantum superposition on purpose for us readers to collapse at our leisure. We can choose not to.
During the reading I rewatched The Plague Dogs the movie (1982). According to the director Martin Rosen – who also directed Watership Down – the fate of the dogs was always clear to him. I recommend watching it, too [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukko
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcKyWIie3Oc
[3] https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/08/21/elmore-leonard-10-rules-of-writing/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Fafe5SY5M
P.S. It was late April in 2009 when my the then-wife asked me “How about getting another dog? It’s been a while.” I had had the very same thoughts myself. She had has it planned already: our next dog would preferably be a Cesky Terrier. If not that, then a Westie. I had no preference but terriers were fine.
In those days the print media still ruled. Sunday’s edition of Helsingin Sanomat (the largest newspaper in the Nordics) was a behemoth. And there was a non-trivial amount of small ads for new puppies.
Against all odds we had a match. “Two Cesky Terrier puppies for sale.” And in our city! In the end we were lucky. The owners had already promised one puppy to a friend of theirs. We competed against an elderly couple, but us having three children the owners figured that the puppy (later named Patu) would have a more active life. They were correct: he did.
Sadly, he succumbed to illness late 2022. Love always ends in sorrow.
P.P.S The next review will be more jolly.
