A Shaggy Dog Tale
In this fetching novel, canines rule the world, but humans don't know it.

Reviewed by Molly Gloss
Sunday, March 2, 2008

THE LABRADOR PACT

By Matt Haig

Viking. 341 pp. $23.95

In the strange world of Matt Haig's new novel, The Labrador Pact, the fate of human society depends on dogs; and since the Springer (Spaniel) Uprising, that world is in turmoil. It is dogs who have always kept the human Family from flying apart, and now that dogs have begun to seek their own pleasure -- to fetch sticks for the fun of it, rather than to please their masters -- the Family is in jeopardy. Humans, knowing nothing of the Uprising (sticks, after all, are still being fetched), "attributed the breakdown in Family life to other factors. The end of community. A longer working day. The growing secularisation of Western society. Bad diet. They couldn't see the real problem. That the dogs had stopped caring."

Well, not all dogs. In these troubling times, Labradors still adhere to the Pact and its list of Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots setting out a dog's duties to the Family, promising, like any decent belief system, an Eternal Reward for the faithful: "To be reunited with your brothers and sisters, to run wild and free in a humanless universe."

Haig's book steers far north of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, if not quite into the epic neighborhood of Animal Farm and Watership Down. The animal perspective is fully adult -- a puckish slant on the disillusionments of modern domestic life.

Prince, the narrator of this fey novel, is a young Labrador rescued from the Dog House by the Hunters, a seemingly perfect suburban family of two kids, a long-standing marriage, a Volvo and now a dog. Being human, the Hunters have no idea they are the ones being rescued -- that by adopting a Labrador, they have gained another chance at happiness. From his wise old canine mentor, Prince learns the difference between humans and dogs: "Whereas dogs can learn to suppress their instincts, for humans there is no hope." And since the Hunters are a Family at the edge of dissolution, it falls to Prince to do what he can to protect them from their self-destructive behaviors.

One of the chief tenets of the Pact is that humans must never know dogs are in control. In fact, the dogs are at some pains to conceal the secret of their power: They not only understand human speech (and for that matter, squirrel and cat speech, too), but they can discern from a scent all the human emotions, from the passionate biggies -- fear, anger, lust -- to much more subtle feelings of confusion, relief or mild contentment.

In most respects, these are dogs that behave convincingly like dogs. "After a couple of dummy-throws, he swung his arm above his shoulder and released the stick. I started to run, fast, as it flew through the air, up towards the sky. As I ran, I watched it all the way, even when flowers hit my chest, watching, waiting for it to reach the highest point, where it paused, motionless, before heading back down -- fast, faster -- until it met the ground in front of me with an awkward bounce. Before it came to rest, the stick was between my teeth, and I was jogging back towards Adam, triumphant."

At crucial moments, though, these dogs behave not much like dogs, but very much like humans -- even to the point of committing murder. It seems as if Haig, a British writer, might be nudging us to see a glimmer of Shakespeare in all the intrigue and machinations: Besides Prince and Henry, there are dogs named Lear and Falstaff, humans called Hal and Kate; and the Hunters' teenage son spouts lines from "Henry IV, Part I" as he practices for his A-level exams.

Yet these allusions are never more than glimmers. In this mostly comic novel, moments feel as if they might spiral into Something Deeper, but the murders are barely acknowledged as real events, and ultimately nothing much seems to be at stake.

The Hunters are, at best, sketchy symbols for our 21st-century disintegrating families: Kate is a clean-freak wife who has withheld sex from her husband for 13 years for no good reason that we ever learn; Charlotte is a rebellious teen who tries suicide and afterward sees the error of her rebellion; Hal is a 16-year-old who masturbates in his bedroom; Adam is a man in the throes of middle-age who takes up jogging when the new young neighbor flirts with him.

Possibly we're not meant to know them any better than this. Perhaps these superficialities are all that Prince perceives, despite his vaunted insight and instinct. Perhaps that's part of the irony. This is, after all, a world in which dogs have become "sniffaholics," a world in which Henry's morning lesson for the young Prince is "Advanced Wag Control." Rather than Shakespeare, the resemblance that comes to mind is to a winking, self-aware Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

There's reason to wonder if the traditional realist novel has worn itself out. Certainly, several respected novelists (Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood) have recently abandoned the form in favor of speculative fictions of various kinds. But The Labrador Pact is not in this class. As Haig pushes beyond the usually somber boundaries of Urban Dysfunctional Fiction, maybe we should just enjoy his novel for what it is: a wry, serio-comic family tail, er, tale, for our serio-comic times. *

Molly Gloss is the author of four novels, including, most recently, "The Hearts of Horses."