Name: Dog Island
ISBN: 9781529400649

Philippe Claudel

Dog Island

Fraser Simons

This book has a strange, self-aware voice. There is literally a chapter where the voice, defining itself as such, sets the scene. We don’t know who the narrator is, and because it is a parable, it takes on an ominous quality. Every character is noted only as the role they play in the society: Teacher, Mayor, Old Woman, Doctor. The odd minor character may have a name, but that person is typically directly accountable for something, at an individual level.

This makes it so when three dead bodies wash ashore and a few people decide to cover it up, the larger community is doing this. There is a shared blame, even if it is apathy. In short order the ecology of his primordial place, without the advancements of technology like phones and the internet, begins to reflect the tumultuous physical landscape, embodied in the islands predominate feature: a volcano. Peaceable for some time. Yet in the right circumstances it has the power to erase itself completely. Cover all trace with magma and poison, as it consumes everything completely. The actions of our archetypes seem to sooth or exacerbate this precipitous condition. 

Tonally it vacillates, but mostly gets away with it due to setting up the uncanny voice and the archetypes of people. When they devolve in caricatures, from time to time, you need only read their “name” to see where it comes from. It’s a straight forward, quick story to read, though it does have a few intersections where these deviations lead you some place else than you’d expect. But the qualities the macro approach imbue the story with, also make it very hard to relate to at a character level or view the story in any other way than it’s self aware self. This can make parts feel overwritten; particularly when the “voice” feels like an almost pointless digression when it zooms in to a granular aspect of the story. It simply cannot do both well. 

Ultimately, it’s a fairly bleak book. Ecology reflecting the inner nature of mankind. Beauty and bounty waiting to be destroyed almost inevitably. Everything else feels like a reprieve. The mystery of the dead men is beside the point. At its heart, this is solely an engagement meant to draw parallels between roles in society—leading one to conclude and extrapolate things about how we have constructed it—as well as the need to see with clear eyes what the things we have constructed says about us. And who, or what, this serves.

Dog Island

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