Sonya Hartnett - Any Dog

Something has happened to the old man. We learn after a while that his name is Kevin, and that he was a doctor who worked with lungs because he was impressed with the “canine faithfulness” of breathing. He never much cared for people, though he had a wife, children, and grandchildren, but he did love his dogs. Kevin has dementia and has probably suffered from a stroke; he wandered away one day and left his grandson's dog locked in the car.

The narrative slips readily away from the present to anchor more firmly in the past. There, Kevin is a young boy, friendless, uncertain around people but enamoured with animals, and particularly with dogs. Hartnett treats the recollections of youth as being stained with the forceful emotions of those times, and in that she is perhaps correct, but it seems odd to find the protagonist of the novel – who firmly, deeply, and with infinite strength and tenderness, loves animals – describing humans as “bovine”, women are “curious as hens”. Why would this boy, who does not love men but feels strongly for animals, use animal metaphors to describe people? It doesn't make sense, it's inconsistent and false, and makes a mockery of the child's feeling.

We can tell when Any Dog has returned to the present: the dialogue begins with a hyphen (- The family's here), as opposed to the speech of the past, which is in capitals (WHAT'S THAT). At first these excursions are confusing, but Hartnett is sure enough to guide the reader through the pitfalls of the back-and-forth though time, and the story settles into an even rhythm.

The child Kevin acquires a dog, Taf. It's trite, perhaps, to mention the two become inseparable – but they do, and for a time, the story turns sweet. The boy clearly loves the animal, finding in Taf the friend he knows he cannot find in a person. And his mother, too, she starts to love the animal, though she was initially against purchasing the dog:

Each afternoon, when I came home from school, my mother would tell me the things he had done. His sleeping, his waking, his yawning, his barks. His watching through the wire fence, his sitting outside the store. His many admirers, his enemies. No dog has such charm.

It's curious, and quite telling, that when Kevin's first dog dies when he is in his twenties, that he almost immediately marries. Hartnett is clever enough to avoid hammering the point home, but it's clear to the reader and, we suspect, to Kevin – he married purely out of loneliness, from the loss of his dog. We learn he has children but not their name; he makes a comment on his wedding day that “The bride was lovely, the wedding fine” - who refers to their wife in that matter, without naming her? A man deeply in love with his deceased dog, is who.

And then we flash back to the present. The police and Kevin's family surround him, questioning in a desperate attempt to discover the whereabouts of the car and his grandchild's dog. He can't remember the car, but the dog – of course!

How dare they. Perhaps I've forgotten other things – inconsequential people, countless patients, the smell of my wife's hair – but never, ever my dog.

But he doesn't, not really. He remembers his dog, primarily his first dog, Taf, but also the other dogs that made up his life. But not his grandson's dog, Luka, who we know is dying of heat exhaustion somewhere.

If we are to step back from the particulars of the plot for a moment and study instead its themes, it becomes readily apparent that Hartnett has misjudged her character and the primary thrust of her story. Any Dog is a narrative concerned with the strong, almost exclusive bond that a person sometimes shares with their pet, and also with the inevitable consequences and subsequent fallout that occurs when the animal, having a shorter lifespan, necessarily dies before the owner. How do they go on, when their heart has been given, and likely permanently? Hartnett would have been wise to stay with this, but instead she reaches for the heart-strings, ready to tug upon them. It is upsetting to learn that the now-senile Kevin has left a dog in a car to die – a dog! And he loves dogs so! At least, that is the reaction we are supposed to have. On balance, it doesn't make sense. A person with dementia does not suffer from a complete absence of self, and, what's more, we know he strongly remembers his feelings for his dogs – the entire story is about how he met and bonded with Taf, his first dog. How can it make sense, then, for the senile Kevin to walk away from a dog, leaving it to die in a car, and not remember? It doesn't, but it certainly works as a “gotcha!” moment for the narrative.

In the end, Hartnett is untruthful to her characters and contemptuous of her readers. The story rapidly descends from an interesting, somewhat curiously constructed meditation on the bond between man and animal, to a hackneyed, implausible, and frankly offensive exercise in manipulation at the expense of narrative integrity. The quality of Hartnett's writing is demolished by the frivolity of her theme and the weakness of her narration; what could have been a meaningful and interesting dissection of the vicissitudes of memory and regret is instead a banal and unfortunate attempt to play with the emotions of the reader at the expense of the cohesion of the story.

Any Dog by Sonya Hartnett is a short story from Black Inc.'s publication, Best Australian Stories 2003.

Author	Sonya Hartnett
Title	Any Dog
Nationality	Australian
Publisher	Black Inc.
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Fishpond (AU)

See Also

Other stories from Black Inc.'s publication, Best Australian Stories 2003 include:
---Turner Hospital, Janette - Hurricane Season

Index of short stories under review

Other titles by Sonya Hartnett under review include:
---Of a Boy