Customer Reviews

The Lost Dog

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The Hamilton Case is one of my favorite books, and The Lost Dog had enough faint traces of what was so captivating about that book that I found it completely maddening to read. The author weaves into a bland and vague love story endless ruminations of visual art, with which she has apparently become captivated. There are glimpses of the brilliance of The Hamilton Case, but overall it is insanely boring to read, and the expression "dancing about architecture" kept popping into my mind as I waded through this thing. I think the author may have suspected as much herself, hence the dog. The only reason I stuck with this book was a ridiculous compulsion to know if the poor thing turned up. I can't help but think that was the point of his disappearance, to manipulate us to endure page after page of undeveloped and unlikable characters and their feelings about a world of self-absorbed pretension. In my case, it worked, but although I made it to the end, I have rarely finished a book with such a feeling of disgust.

The latest novel by Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog, is a story about life, the modern world, and its imperfections. It is part love story, part mystery, and also a social commentary of the modern world. Its origins lie in an incident familiar to de Kretser, as in 2001, her dog, Gus went missing while staying at a farm.
In our story, Tom Loxley is a professor writing a book on Henry James. He takes his dog with him to a small "cabin" in the Australian outback to focus on finishing the project that he seems incapable of completing. The retreat is owned by Nellie Zhang, a semi-famous artist who has a past that is questionable, and that slowly unfolds to the reader throughout the book. Tom's emotional and physical attractions to Nellie comprise one of the main storylines of The Lost Dog.
Several other plotlines are present in the novel, including the story of the search for the dog. The past lives of Tom, Nellie, and Tom's mother are all woven together to provide the framework of de Kretser's story.
Michelle de Kretser is an author who was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated to Australia at the age of 14. The immigrant experience serves as a touchstone for several of the themes present in the novel. Important themes that are explored are the modern world, progress, aging, art, and family.
The thing that is most impressive about de Kretser's writing is her use of the metaphor. A description of Tom's father is one example: "He was an umbrella, tightly furled. Springing open, he might gouge flesh from your fingers."
The author is much-praised for her writing style. Her second novel, The Hamilton Case, received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (a recognition for the South East Asia and South Pacific region). Her prose is masterful , and the novel well crafted. She makes use of a popular-of-late device, the unreliable narrator. The story has twists and turns that allude to Henry James, the focus of Tom Loxley's expertise.
The only problem with the novel may be that it is too masterful to be pleasurable, yet this may be a desired intent of the author. The characters are not lovable, but you will keep turning the pages, if only to find out, "WHAT HAPPENS TO THE DOG???"

I found this book tiresome and annoying. The only interesting relationship is that between Tom and his dog, and even that one goes around and around endlessly in a kind of fog. Poor Tom is so static and ineffectual he gets on one's nerves--sort of like all those pathetic Henry James non-heroes who are paralyzed by timidity, guilt and endless belly-button contemplation. And Nelly, with her outlandish clothing and incomprehensible behavior, never becomes the least bit sympathetic or believable as a person.

But the most annoying thing of all is the self-consciously clever use of language, including metaphors that are so strange that they slow the book down immeasurably while the poor reader tries to figure them out. This is "sensibility" raised to the point of the ridiculous. The only reason I read it is that I didn't have anything else to read at the moment.

The dog of Tom Loxley, a writer and professor, breaks away when a wallaby crosses the path in the Australian bush where Tom has taken a weekend to use a friend's, Nelly Zhang, rural shack to complete a book on Henry James. However, the loss of a dog is more of a metaphor for the constant search in the book for the meaning of life, modernity, and the past.

Tom of English and Indian parents arrived in Australia as a teenager and Nelly is a descendant of several nationalities, including Asian. The mixed ethnicity is not without its discomforts to them both. Tom becomes infatuated with Nelly over her highly unique artistic talents combining painting and photography. But she is mostly an enigma to Tom - her past is hazy and contributes to Tom's frequent invoking of his Indian childhood.

The plot elements are few. Beyond searching for the dog, the sudden and suspicious disappearance of Nelly's stockbroker husband many years before occupies Tom. Both the dog search and the constant return to Tom's India become tiresome. The plot serves more as a mechanism for the author to issue a series of keen observations on life, some delivered by the characters, and some through the narrator. The bouncing around among locales and time frames makes the reading a bit of a struggle. Perhaps, the smartness of the book slightly outweighs its obscurity.

If you enjoy A.S. Byatt's books, you may enjoy this book. It is richly themed and multi-faceted in characterization, action and ideas. I appreciated how incidences and characters inter-act and effect each other. I also appreciated that some story lines were not tied up nicely and solved.

I enjoyed the writing, the presentation of the art world, and the adherence to Henry James' quote that "the whole of anything cannot be told."

As an artist, I chuckled and then gave much thought to the fact that Nelly --the artist-- was selling photographed paintings rather than the real thing. I don't think that the author just threw this in as an interesting are story. It has meaning in both plot and themes.

I was only bored by the author's over wrought presentation of feces.

A richly imagined exploration of the myriad connections between art and life, The Lost Dog is part mystery and also part character study of one man, an immigrant in one country and an isolated, misunderstood child in another. Tom Loxley is haunted by his childhood in India, a glamorous, doting mother and a father who although extravagant and a drunk, is able to bring his family to make a new life for themselves in 1970's Australia.

It is these sights, sounds and smells of his ancestral home which shape Tom's attitides to his new country. Even in his mid-thirties, working as a semi-successful literary professor, while also working on a book about Henry James, Tom critically examines those around him, still emotionally attached to his octogenarian mother Iris whose arthritic knees are steadily diminishing her quality of life, and later, his ex-wife, who over the years after their divorce has treated Tom with a mixture of disdain and condescending authority.

Only when Tom suddenly loses his dog in the Australian bush while working on his book, the last vision he sees is of the animal lean and white, rust-spotched, springing up a bank, does his story spring back to seven months earlier, beginning with a painting he sees st an art gallery he hadn't entered in the four years since his wife left. It is here at a group show of four young artists that Tom meets the Chinese-Australian artist and photographer, Nelly Zhang who instantly attracts him with her mysteriousness and ambiguities.

Soon enough he's visiting Nelly at The Preserve, a ramshackle warehouse which serves as her home and studio, which also she shares with her son teenage son, Rory and the beautiful fellow artist Yelena, who "men circle like moons." But it is Nelly that Tom is most emotionally attracted too, even as she stages elaborate scenarios that mimic the solidarity of truth. Tom is a man who seems to exist in a remote world, his days carefully constructed, his concerns about Iris's failing health threatening to consume him, and then there's the problem of what to do about his lost dog.

Certainly, the days he spends at The Preserve, make him realise how acute his loneliness has been, this tightly knit collection of people offering companionship and conversation and reflecting Tom's increasing need for Nelly and for the world that she had created and the sense of being caught up in her wide spate of imaginative work. But in the end Nelly's indistinct world seems to offer more questions than answers: even as she steadily endears herself to Tom, there are ambiguities eddying her surface, the sweetness that ran in her depths, a detailing of good fortune, precluding a failed relationship, a famous husband who went missing, and rumours of an unhappy marriage where there were always arguments about money.

As Tom tries to piece together all these bit and pieces, the little unconnected facts about Nelly's life, while also longing to know more about Nelly's short-lived marriage, he also continues to search for his dog, the missing animal a powerful metaphor for Tom's own life in Australia, where his past childhood in India keeps glimmering to the surface: a declining family of dowager ladies, servants, of a tin-roofed out-bungalow on a tea garden in the Nilgris and a coarse grandfather who had continues to believe in the supremacy of the English race until his death, and a neurotic procession in the form of gurus and lovers winding back to Tom's childhood. Now the estimable Nelly has her own place in Tom's "diaphanous parade."

This novel swirls with kaleidoscopic images of contemporary Australia, de Krester's prose coming across like a churning and whirling abstract painting: the cattle raising their heavy heads, magpies driving their beaks into damp earth, a stand of eucalypts in a park and graffiti on an overpass. The descriptions of urban malls and the outskirts of the city are juxtaposed with a past that constantly waits Tom, as he remembers the aromatic streets of his childhood: the feces animal and human lingering on display, "his youth odorous, unhygienic and refusing to be disposed of with decent haste."

An exhilarating concoction of the past and the present, the author combines the elements of the mystery into a type of intellectual exploration on the nature of art and its place in contemporary society, with Tom - and Nelly - acting as ciphers and symbols for the way we see and view the world. Ultimately history sinks beneath of the imperatives of the present in this novel, a story of one man trying to find his place in a chaotic and senseless world and an artist whose vision is symptomatic of a more profound desire: to drag moments of perception from "the gray ooze of oblivion" into a bright new world. Mike Leonard June 08.

Tom Loxley, an Indian-Australian professor, is less concerned with finishing his book on Henry James than with finding his dog, who is lost in the Australian bush.
Joining his daily hunt is Nelly Zhang, an artist whose husband disappeared mysteriously years before Tom met her. Although Nelly helps him search for his beloved pet, Tom isn't sure if he should trust this new friend.
Tom has preoccupations other than his book and Nelly and his missing dog, mainly concerning his mother, who is suffering from the various indignities of old age. He is constantly drawn from the cerebral to the primitive--by his mother's infirmities, as well as by Nelly's attractions. THE LOST DOG makes brilliant use of the conventions of suspense and atmosphere while leading us to see anew the ever-present conflicts between our bodies and our minds, the present and the past, the primal and the civilized.

Although this writing style is enjoyed by some, I find it extremely annoying. The story was lost in the flowery language and non-stop metaphors. It was not a pleasant read for me. Because I don't like the style doesn't mean that this is a bad book, it was just too distracting for me to enjoy. The characters are not anyone I would ever want to meet, except for the poor dog.

I recommend that you use the Amazon "look inside" feature and see if you like this style of writing.