Nov 30 2009
Dog Boy by Eva Hornung
When does a short story become a novel? I’m not looking for an answer like “when it’s a novella” or one that involves numbers of pages or words. Rather, I’m interested in process: how an idea for a story, a story that could fill say five or ten thousand words (well within the classic definition of a short story), might be “stretched” into novel-length. Can we tell when this has happened? Can we point at a place in the text and say “there, that’s where it happened”?
I’m going to argue that with Eva Hornung’s novel Dog Boy we can see where the story changes from an idea that perfectly suited a short story into an idea for a longer-length work. We might also consider why it is that the long-form is the only kind of fiction that is rewarded in the world of publishing, but let’s start with Dog Boy.
It’s a great title isn’t it? Actually, I’m unhappy because I nicknamed the abandoned dog we adopted on Boxing Day 2008, “Dog Boy”. It isn’t the name we formally gave him, but still, it’s his and my name. So in early 2009, when I heard of Australian writer Eva Hornung’s new (she has previously published as Eva Sallis) book, Dog Boy, I was a bit miffed.
But I was also very intrigued. What a great premise, a boy from the city who is lost, still in the urban landscape but now parentless and adopted by a pack of wild dogs. Of course, the idea of a manchild being raised by Canis lupus familiaris is not new, think Romulus and Remus, but setting it in the present day, even somewhere as different as post-Soviet Moscow, is certainly new.
And the opening chapters with their description of a young boy fending for himself in an abandoned apartment, right from the first page, put us in a dark situation. We are there with him, scrabbling in the cupboards for a tin of soup, hoping for some vegetables or fruit hidden away and still worth eating. But Romochka isn’t us (he’s narrated in the third person) and we have to watch him as he struggles to survive in the cold flat with winter gathering outside, literally and metaphorically.
Why he’s been abandoned, where his mother is, why there’s no one looking after him, these questions float through our minds, but there isn’t time, what matters is survival. It’s simply too urgent. And we know he can’t survive alone in this apartment. Which is why, when we first see the dogs and especially the mother-bitch with her pale yellow hair and her double row of breasts, we know what must happen. This is how the conceits of fiction work — the premise is stated, the traps have been laid, and we readers collude cheerfully — the bait is swallowed, the premise accepted, and we desperately want to know what happens next.
The boy goes with the dogs, and what follows, the rapidly developing intimacy and in particular the extraordinary description of nurturing, is truly magical. Anyone who has shared their life with an animal will appreciate the sense of equality, of common ground as well as of profound, unbridgeable difference that the writer brings to her account. There’s a wonderful democracy in the narrative as we follow the boy and the dogs to their lair and watch them learning about each other.
But something happens to the story as it changes and becomes bigger. New elements are introduced — after all, a novel differs from a short story not simply in length but also in complexity. This can be in terms of time, a story developing over a longer time frame; it can be through complication, often in the form of a subplot, the introduction of a new character or situation that diverts the flow of the narrative as it both works toward resolution and adds to the thematic purpose of the work.
Dog Boy sees complication. The Strangers arrive, from the north, hungry and savage. Humans too, in the form of the fringe dwellers who scavenge for sustenance on the rubbish mountain. And Romochka has to wander from the lair, he can’t stay there for ever. He sees a woman, a singer, who attracts him and may provide some way back into the human world. There’s a cook at an Italian restaurant, a round, homely woman who befriends him and his pack. The story continues to grow as he finds ways to cross the city. On one such journey he climbs into the apartment of a family who have children his age. He looks at himself in a mirror, as if for the first time, and is shocked by what he sees.
These developments are interesting and often rivetingly told, but they lack overall cohesion. There’s a sense of thematic development, but no clear argument emerges. Indeed the story falters seriously towards the third quarter, so much so that when we are introduced to completely different points-of-view, those of Dmitry and Natyla, researchers who come across Romochka, we might feel betrayed. What happened to the marvellous story of His Life as a Dog?
I won’t go on to describe how the story ends but I will say that in my opinion the idea works brilliantly as a long short story, giving us the sense of what it could be like to live as an animal, accepted as one of the pack, sharing in the adventures and dangers that face a completely different species. But as a novel, Dog Boy does not work so well. Thematically vague and undermined by the introduction of new points-of-view which distract from the drive of the story, this reads to me as something that was forced to grow. The point where the complexities arrive, when we meet the singing woman and become aware of the outside world, that is the point where the short story became a novel, and it’s the point where a most impressive work of imagination might have been better to have stopped.
Why it continued, why a novel was made when a short story might have been more efficient and more effective, I wouldn’t like to say, but I suspect it has everything to do with publishers’ need for novel-length product. Writers cannot earn a living from short stories; publishers don’t think they can sell them. It’s as simple as that.
I read Dog Boy several months ago and am writing this now largely from memory. The story impressed me greatly and anyone who is interested in cross-species writing (if such a description may be allowed) will find much in this work. Indeed, as I take my dog for walks every day, and he marks places here and there, I find myself thinking about “open” and “closed” paths, the invisible corridors Hornung’s dogs delineate for themselves and others. I have no idea whether her idea has any scientific validity, but it is such a beautiful concept that I don’t care. And I am grateful for having read the story, never mind my misgivings about structure and length. It’s a fascinating work.