Joseph O'Neill is often listed among Irish writers, having been born in Cork and lived here as a toddler. He may well be entitled to claim multiple nationalities, as he was reared in the Netherlands, was educated in Britain and is now a US citizen. His compelling early nonfiction work The Blood-Dark Track, a family memoir, is the parallel tale of the incarceration of both his Turkish and Irish grandfathers at much the same time, in different parts of the world, and before marriage united them through their progeny. Both men were considered subversives by British authorities.
O'Neill is better known for his award-winning novel Netherland, an unlikely bestseller. A cricket novel about New York (who knew?), the book sifts through historical and social levels of the metropolis. In the eerie wake of 9/11 it connected the orbits of new immigrants from the developing world and that of a Wall Street investment analyst from Manhattan's first European elite, the Dutch.
The Dog, which shares much with the structure of Netherland, has the distinction of being the first book nominated for the Man Booker Prize, under its new remit, before publication in the UK. Its acknowledgments page would be the envy of many an author, indicating the cosseted world of fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Yaddo writers' colony, the Guggenheim Foundation and more. Readers can thus expect a great deal from this writer – and they won't be disappointed.
Exploring privilege in the postmodern, affectless world of the uber-rich is precisely the author's intent in The Dog. The narrator, located somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum, provides insight into this enclave. He is nameless and has worked diligently to expunge the use of his loathed first name, substituting an X in its place. A transplanted New York lawyer fleeing from a failed relationship, he has assumed an ill-defined, possibly illegal role as manager of a vast family fortune in quintessentially soulless Dubai.
Global world
The story opens in 2007, months before the international financial crisis. Our existential hero has a Beckettian soul, although his rhetoric is artfully clogged with complex tenses and tortuous disclaimers that give him the air of a Victorian scrivener. His legal training and obsessive traits combine as he formulates his thoughts in serial parentheticals, so that many of the paragraphs in the book end thus:)))). All this is delivered with timing and in predicaments redolent of the early Woody Allen. How else could a baseless argument with a woman who reminds him of the original Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (whose obituary he has just read) end in a major lentil incident?
The Dog is comic, and much else besides. O'Neill, more than any other writer in English, inhabits a global world effortlessly. Much has been written about the negative effects of globalisation on the quality of the English language used by major writers working with one eye on international markets, but O'Neill's prose is never less than exacting and exalted. Describing the housing along an arterial road in Dubai, the protagonist is reminded of "Ceausescu's Bucharest boulevards: visually coercive concrete apartment buildings that speak of broken Haussmannian dreams". (The layers of cultural accretion in that skilful sentence alone are worthy of an essay.)
O'Neill is, on the other hand, perfectly capable of inserting a large pin into the balloon of pretension that buoys up many novels aspiring to "globality", right down to a playfully pointed neologistic vocabulary and wry observations of such "globality" in those slick advertisements for Emirate Airlines that feature "superior polyglot" women. These "ethnically elusive" beings, from the perspective of O'Neill's expat consiglieri, resemble peripheral cast members of Star Trek more than they do human beings. Or, as he asks more than once in desperation, "Who are these people?"
Along the way in this exploration of exploitative capitalism O’Neill sketches characters as diverse as Ali, a bidoon, or stateless person, who is Jeeves to our narrator’s Wooster; Ollie, an Australian scuba diver and pedicurist given to bursts of “podiatric poetry”; the mysterious Ted Wilson, “the Man from Atlantis” with two lives and two wives; and the immensely fat Sandro Batros, one of many very rich people who populate this book and whose effete appetites must be satiated. The Batros family indirectly provides the Irish bit of the book. The narrator and Eddie shared a flat on Lansdowne Road in their student days, and Maman Batros turns out to be one Alice Rourke from Mullingar. Yeatsian allusions, too, provide something of an Irish leitmotif.
Vacuous land
Dubai’s here and now otherworld comes with multiple echoes of Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
, complemented by the jacket art. This “abracadabrapolis”, with its skyline of graceful cranes and its constant quest to score more entries in
Guinness
World Records
, is a place the narrator hopes will never be finished. He understands implicitly that it is in such activity that the only energy is to be found in his otherwise vacuous adopted land. O’Neill works the concept of mirage in this desert story with optical tricks, distortion, shadows, reflective glass and all forms of duplicity. It is a Fata Morgana of the most sublime kind, an entire city aspiring to replicate an airport VIP lounge.
The most salient concern probed in The Dog is how we can act as moral beings in an insanely imperfect world that tosses immoral opportunities and directives our way constantly. O'Neill manages to worry the problem without preaching, although the occasional rant produces longueur. We hear the voice of a rational, albeit obsessive man who forces us to weigh morality's relative merits in circumstances and in verbal conundrums that alternate between sheer silliness (writing mental emails he never sends, or real emails to which his employers never respond) and true worth (how to determine an adequate degree of philanthropy). The existential yearning in these pages is somehow more palatable, achievable and less grim than is usually the case.
As for the title, the narrator is the dog, or the dog is the narrator. He feels he belongs in, or has been sent to, the doghouse when he acts dishonestly or unworthily. Sometimes he knows he doesn't deserve to be put there – particularly by his unpleasant ex-girlfriend – but he does always sense innately when he has fallen short of expectation. Joseph O'Neill need never confront such feelings for having written The Dog.
