a dog’s life

A Dog’s Life by Michael Holroyd (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969)

A dark, funny, small book — a day in the life of a (literally) decaying eccentric British family recorded with a bracing ruthlessness that keeps the sentimental aspects of the story — a dying and, finally, dead, dog — from cloying, and is in fact quite touching.

The Farquhars, based on Holroyd’s own family, live on seriously diminishing means in damp, faded, and crumbling gentility somewhere in suburban England in the 1950s.  The book follows them all — Eustace, the patriarch; Ann, his wife; Mathilda, his much younger maiden sister; Henry, his son, Miss Toth, an ancient nursemaid; Kenneth, his grandson; and Smith, the family’s beloved dying dog — through a single day.  All these characters (except Smith) are lonely and miserable, and spend all their time vexing and abusing one another, despite the wells of affection that have been so successfully repressed as to almost have been entirely forgotten.  But something about the ailing dog in their midst allows them to access shards of the affection and tenderness that secretly binds them, and a sort of heartbreaking, though repressed, epiphany is reached by one and all.

An unusual book in style, tone, and subject that I enjoyed reading and was strangely and deeply moved by, and admired.  Interestingly enough, the book, published in the US in 1969, was not until very recently published in the UK because Holroyd’s father threatened to sue for defamation.