t first glance, it all looks pretty grim. Lives of the Monster Dogs, which is Kirsten Bakis's first novel, has a very quiet, dignified, upmarket cover. It comes from Farrar Straus Giroux, publishers not known for publishing much science fiction; and when they do publish SF or fantasy -- by authors like Donald Barthelme, Harold Bloom, Rick DeMarinis, Carlos Fuentos, McDonald Harris, Philip Kerr, Danilo Kis, Walker Percy or Richard Powers -- they tend not to admit the fact. Lives of the Monster Dogs, described in the blurb as "a weird and haunting parable for our times," is clearly not meant for yahoos like us.
But let's open the thing anyway.
Let's see if it's possible to outsmart the suits at FSG and read Monster Dogs aright.
Luck turns out to be with us.
Lives of the Monster Dogs does show a few signs that its author may be unfamiliar with the generic expectations of SF readers; her 2009 New York is, for instance, numbingly identical to New York in 1997, which means that she has failed to make full ironizing use of the coign of vantage of the Near Future.
And knowing readers will also miss any sense that Bakis is not very familiar with the rich tradition of contemporary Beast Fable. Texts which bear, all too invisibly, upon her tale include Christopher Morley's Where the Blue Begins (1922), set in a New York occupied by dogs; Olaf Stapledon's Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord (1944), whose dog protagonist boasts enhanced intelligence (as do the dogs in Bakis's tale) and falls in love with a human girl (as does the dog protagonist of Monster Dogs); George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945); Scott Bradfield's Animal Planet (1995), much of it set in a New York far more savagely up-to-date than Bakis's New Yorker-cartoon venue. Other titles come to mind; but enough's enough.
The first positive thing readers might notice is speed
Perhaps the first positive thing the genre reader might notice in Bakis's tale is its speed. In less than 300 pages, Monster Dogs traverses several venues -- 19th century Germany, wilderness Canada, New York itself.
It incorporates several modes of telling -- the actual "Lives of the Monster Dogs," a formal history written by one of them, the first-person memories of a young woman who experienced the story first-hand and whose task it is to put everything into book form, an embedded opera libretto slightly reminiscent of that for Rossini's William Tell (1829), a play, letters, journals, newspaper articles.
And it delineates, with uncanny (almost clammy) intensity, several very diverse characters. There is Augustus Rank, the 19th century German scientist whose tortured psyche led him, like H. G. Wells's Doctor Moreau, into creating by surgical means a cadre of dogs whose upright posture comes from operations, whose prosthetic hands are painful and awkward, as are the voice-boxes necessary for the generation of speech, and who do not breed true. He's a bit like (but ultimately very much more scathingly drawn than) the obsessed 19th century scientists who dominate Brooks Hansen's brilliant The Chess Garden: or, the Twilight Letters of Gustav Eyterhoeven (1995), another Farrar Straus Giroux publication many SF/fantasy readers may have missed because it was marketed posh.
There are dogs -- the historian Ludwig von Sacher, and the revolutionary hero/villain, Mops Hacker, and the graceful but deadly Lydia, and others.
And there is Cleo Pira, who is hired by the dogs after they revolt and abandon their prison in Canada (where Augustus Rank had taken their ancestors 100 years earlier, after the German Emperor-to-be had grown tired of financing him; and where Rank's successors continue their experiments) and come to New York, where they build a Disneyesque castle on Houston Street and, eventually, die.
Pyrotechnical and clever
The book is pyrotechnical and clever; and there are a few moments when it almost slithers into camp. But permeating its swiftness and complexity, a judicious calm subtlety in the depiction of character and milieu warns the reader that a real story, quicksilver and steely, may be sliding into the heart. It does.
That story -- like the story of Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (1966) -- is a tragedy. Ludwig von Sacher is the first to notice that his enhanced intelligence is temporary, and that he will inevitably revert into a creature dog. The knowledge is unbearable to him, despite his spatchcocked physical being, his spiritual estrangement, the pathos of his human posture. Though he and his fellows show all the signs of being immigrants to the human condition, they have become addicted to us. They cannot tolerate the thought of not knowing the world.
In the end, the Disneyesque palace hosts a rather mild-mannered Disneyesque saturnalia, and the dogs, variously, die. Through their assumption of human nature, they had gained some apprehension of something mysterious, which might be called Reality. But afterwards, not a jot remains.
In the end, Lives of the Monster Dogs more than earns its keep. It is a rich feast, a muscular and compulsive read, and an epitaph.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Omni, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Look at the Evidence, has been nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award.
