Invisible Dogs
Charles Boyle
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From the publisher
'They ran wild in packs. They spread disease. They fouled the pavements. They kept us awake and then infected our dreams. They bred faster than rabbits. They laughed at the police. Whole districts became no-go areas. Finally the government took action: they were rounded up and slaughtered and buried in pits and now there are no dogs.’
Invisible Dogs is the travel diary of an English writer invited to a country in which there are no dogs – but he keeps seeing them, vanishing around corners. There are rumours of dogs gathering in the mountains, preparing for an assault on the city.
‘Invisible Dogs is such a direct, lucid text that the reader might mistake it for a simple record of a visit to an authoritarian country. But Boyle’s wry and wiry prose, an invisible dog in itself, makes an eye contact you can’t break and produces thereafter a quietly deadly picture of the viewed and the viewer, the destination and the traveller.’
– M. John Harrison
‘Funny, sinister, thought-moving like light, subtly then increasingly terrifying. Its intelligence reads like relief. Its determination not to language- or life-launder leaves it and the experience of reading it clean and cleansing re the shining and the very dark and the strangeness of us.’
– Ali Smith
‘The eponymous absence of dogs is not, it turns out, actually an absence – just an act of collective bad faith. The dogs are still there, but the locals have agreed to pretend they aren’t. Though Mike knows what’s going on – “It’s the things they are not telling us that we should be paying attention to” – he’s soon all-too-willing to toe the official line. As for the narrator, his apparent superiority to his hosts soon erodes: “I told the journalist that in my country it’s not dogs but beggars that are invisible.” Eventually, the pair tire of answering inane questions about their writing and appearing at official events; they start to explore for themselves, visiting off-grid street markets – and losing their hosts’ trust.
‘Invisible Dogs is a layered book. To paint it as one big Swiftian metaphor about the ease with which we accept the erasure of the most vulnerable, or a simple parable about the smiling removal of freedoms of recent years, wouldn’t be enough. It also contains satirical meta-swipes at the fact that, as writers, “we were all in sales”, a subtle portrait of the paranoia induced by surveillance, and more besides. Boyle has created something dread-making, with real elegance.’
– Declan Ryan, Daily Telegraph