The Dog of the North

From the cover and the publisher's summary, I assumed The Dog Of The North was going to be another take on the familiar theme of Redemption By Roadtrip. One of those books where a likeable woman has arrived, through a series of unfortunate events, at a point where the life she'd expected to live has imploded so she sets out on a lone quest to find a new place where she can belong and along the way, she encounters larger-than-life characters who help her discover her inner strength and some of whom become her found-family when she finally starts to build a life that will help her be her true self. Cue sunset and happy-ever-after music. It's a good theme and I'd have been happy to see a few new twists on old tropes.

One line on the cover show more should have told me that my expectations might be a little off. The one that says Shortlisted For The Women's Prize For Fiction. The Women's Prize For Fiction normally goes to quite literary books. The 2022 winner was Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness. The 2021 winner was Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. It's not the kind of prize a Redemption By Roadtrip novel is likely to win unless it goes way off-piste.

By the way, the publisher seems to have gotten ahead of itself with that statement. The Dog Of The North is on the Women's Prize For Fiction Longlist but the Shortlist won't be announced until 28th April, more than a month from now.

Anyway, it turns out that The Dog Of The North was... well... odd. Cleverly, nicely, engagingly, sometimes humorously odd but always, and ultimately disturbingly, odd.

The oddness starts with the main character and is compounded by how she tells her story. Penny Rush is a woman in her thirties who has been so deeply damaged by her childhood and her marriage that she's reached a point where she is unsure of her right to be anywhere. She struggles with the most humdrum human interactions. Her first instinct is to be as invisible as possible and, when that's not possible, to apologise for her own existence. Penny is confused and she has difficulty being honest with herself about how she feels and what she wants. As Penny is the one telling the story, it shouldn't be surprising that I was also confused as I read the story.

I was halfway through the book and still had no idea where the story was going. The narrative felt like a long fall down a rabbit hole. I could see that this 'falling forward' mirrored Penny's mental state. She has difficulty having confidence in her own worth, bordering on uncertainty about her right to be anywhere. She is unmoored from her past life and coping with the chaos of her grandparents' lives while trying to find a place and a person to be. Her grandmother is a domineering, aggressive, accomplished woman who lives partly in a fantasy world, suffers from paranoia and mood swings and has a life-long habit of using the people around her to get her own way. Her grandfather is in a failing marriage to a much younger woman and is starting to suffer from cognitive decline. Penny, who puts a lot of energy into avoiding confronting her own problems, somehow ends up taking responsibility for solving her grandparents' problems. The result, of course, is chaos.

The publishers described this book as 'darkly comic'. I think that means it will make you laugh but you'll feel guilty about it afterwards.

This book didn't make me laugh. Not once. I don't think that's what it was trying to do. This is a story about a woman who is so starved of affection and so unused to human connection that she becomes inappropriately emotionally attached to anyone who shows her kindness. The man who first shows her kindness also has issues. He's divorced, off his depression meds, living out of his van and in danger of losing his law practice. This makes for some bizarre scenes but I didn't find any of them funny.

I hadn't realised it as I was reading but I'd become emotionally detached as I listened to Penny's account of a series of increasingly bizarre mishaps. This was partly because she told her story in a way that made light of her anxiety and her problems with her self-worth so that this story felt like a comedy where the humour was falling flat. Then, in the final section of the book, I was given a flashback to Penny's childhood that took me from detachment to anger in seconds. I was listening to a pompous, ludicrously over-confident paediatrician mangling a psychiatric assessment with ten-year-old Penny and suddenly I was truly angry. I wanted to strangle him for the damage he was doing.

So, now I was engaged and ready for the big finish. It didn't happen. Perhaps I was only expecting it to happen because I still hadn't let go of my Redemption By Roadtrip expectations and was looking for Penny's route to her Happy-Ever-After. What actually happened was more subtle, probably more truthful but sadly much less satisfying. Penny didn't have an epiphany. She didn't solve all her problems in a single step by attaching herself to new people She didn't suddenly become strong and fulfilled and self-confident. BUT she did start to like herself a little more and to find ways of saying what she wanted and what she didn't want and to feel entitled to prioritise her own needs.

As I said, it's an odd book. In this case, odd isn't bad but it does make the reader work harder to understand what they're reading. show less

It's not an exaggeration to say that our heroine, Penny, is somewhat unlucky in her personal relationships. Her mother and step-father disappeared without trace five years previously in the Australian outback while her biological father seems extremely unbalanced. Her ninety year old grandfather needs rescuing from the clutches of a selfish and unsympathetic second wife. And her grandmother (the intensely annoying first wife) needs rescuing from the clutches of Adult Protective Services:

I nodded grimly. The urgency of the situation stemmed from a recent incident involving Meals on Wheels. On Pincer’s behalf I’d applied for their services, but the day they showed up, she threatened to shoot if they didn’t vacate the premises

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immediately. Someone had seen her wielding an object that looked like a bazooka. That led to a complaint to the police, which led to Adult Protective Services, which led to the involvement of a woman by the name of Ruth Perry, who warned me there would be swift consequences if we didn’t disarm her and provide for her needs immediately.

And so Penny travels from her home in Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara to assist, abandoning her adulterous husband Sherman and her dead-end job in a dentist's surgery along the way. With only a few hundred dollars in her pocket that she has received from selling her car, she accepts the offer of a place to stay for a few nights from her grandmother's accountant Bert Lampey, who she has been dealing with other the phone. But rather than the besuited corporate type that she is expecting, she is surprised to find that Bert turns up in a battered ancient van, nicknamed 'The Dog of the North' that seems to contain virtually all his worldly goods. And she is even more surprised to find that his offer of a place to stay consists of a sleeping bag on his office couch, an office in which he is actually living in himself...

This was a fun book, that made me laugh out loud at times (and books don't often do that). show less

Though I'd have preferred to have company, there was no question that I felt comfortable being alone at that moment and was glad to see there were other people in nearby cars who felt the same. I thought about all the times I'd sat at the edges of groups in conversation, listening, enjoying myself, but surely considered the person with the least to contribute, the way the least interesting creature in an aquarium is generally agreed to be the slug over in the corner. Overall, it seemed like I had to work extra hard just to make any kind of relationship work. And in that sense, I had a lot to offer.

It's hard to review a book I enjoyed so thoroughly. It's an oddball book, to be sure. Any description of the plot is either gives too much show more away or is inscrutably cryptic. There's a hostile Grandmother who is both a scientist and a hoarder, with an uncertain number of literal skeletons hidden away. There's an accountant undergoing a health emergency who may or may not share a toupee with his younger brother. There are parents long lost in the Australian outback and a dog named Kweecoats, for absolutely the most convoluted reason. There's an old van that is conveniently furnished with a futon and less conveniently furnished with a tire and a bike. And through all the chaos, Penny, our protagonist does her best. She's a mess, but she's also resilient and determined to find her way and help her family.

I hesitate to call this book charming, because I will absolutely not pick up a book anyone calls charming, thank you very much. Penny has such a wonderfully weird take on life, a life in which she has been beat up pretty thoroughly, that gives her a determined kind of optimism and to make friends out of people very different from herself. I loved this book, was entirely immersed in every strange thing life threw at Penny, and will be automatically reading whatever McKenzie writes next. show less

I knew I had to read “The Dog of the North” by Elizabeth McKenzie (2023) because I loved “The Dog of the South” by Charles Portis.

Although the McKenzie novel was clearly inspired by the Portis novel (1979), the only clear allusion to the earlier work comes early when Penny Rush, our narrator, asks why a beat-up old van is called the Dog of the North. She's told it was named "in honor of a beloved novel with a similar name." And, yes, the Dog of the South is also the name of a vehicle, an old bus.

The newer novel is by no means a sequel, and the characters are entirely different, yet it has a spirit similar to that of the Portis novel. It is also a hero-takes-a-crazy-journey kind of story, this time with a female hero.

Penny has show more family troubles. She has left her husband. Her mother and stepfather disappeared in the Australian outback five years before. She goes to Santa Barbara to try to help her grandparents, who divorced years ago, to sort out their problems. Her grandfather has been given the boot by his current wife, while her grandmother, Pincer, a retired physician, has gone loopy, lives in clutter and filth and is found to have a man's skeleton on her property.

Penny takes a shine to Burt, a man who owns that van and who has been trying to help Pincer. He develops serious health problems, which brings his brother Dale to his side. And then Penny takes a shine to him.

Th scene shifts to Texas, and then she and her grandfather decide to fly to Australia to make one last attempt to discover what happened to her mother and stepfather.

And it all ends in Carlsbad Caverns.

Many novelists have attempted to tell wacky travel adventures of this sort, but few have succeeded as well as Charles Portis. And now Elizabeth McKenzie. show less

Well that book is stuffed full of quirky characters.

First is Penny, somewhere on the spectrum, finding social situations awkward but also has experienced situations where animals have talked to her, specifically a fish. This was as she floated out to see when she rescued a 'grunion' who turned out to be a 'false grunion' but who she felt was a friend that she could talk to. Fortunately, she was rescued by a ship.

There is Burt Lampey, her grandmother's accountant who wears a toupee that he eventually ditches and gives to his dog to make a nest in. He is very ill but provides Penny with a campervan to stay in whilst she is visiting him and her grandmother. He sees himself as a ladies man and lives in his office. His dog is called show more Kweecoats although on his collar tag it says Quixote.

Her grandmother must be the most peculiar with dead bodies in the shed and other places around her house. A house so filthy that the cleaning agency who are called in to clean it whilst she is in hospital find 29 dead rats but can't find the gun that she brandished at the meals-on-wheels people. She is Dr Pincer and has a little dementia which can show itself in furious criticising of people and then completely forgetting it happened. I wonder how many grandmothers have stabbed their granddaughters in the leg with a brooch that had rat or mouse pee on it?

The story is told from Penny's point of view, where she has left her job, her soon to be ex-hsband and answered a call to come and help her grandmother but ends up having adventures with travel to try and find her missing parents along with Arlo her grandfather (divorced from Pincer but remarried). There are meals with other people, experiments, visiting family, people becoming ill or arrested whilst Penny works out some of her childhood trauma. She does not fit in but McKenzie shows us that we are all a bit flawed - what is normal, after all?

As this is a quest story with very few wise people to help Penny on her way, it is remarkable that at the end she finds her way through the chaos to hope with family and love and healing the outcome.

I imagine that this book is named after The Dog of the South by Ray Midge. I haven't read it but it is said to be an eventful trip to South America to retrieve his stolen Ford Torino and possibly win his wife back again. There are definite parallels between the books.

This is a funny book with Penny's interior world guiding us through. show less

The protagonist (Penny) is having marriage issues and her grandmother is having old age issues. So she goes to help her. An interesting cast of characters emerges including a pair of brothers one of which is grandma's friend. and has a dilapidated old van he has nicknamed "the dog of the North," There are many twists including a skeleton found in grandma's storage shed. The novel is quite good but takes a dip when Penny decides to see her sister in Australia which kills the momentum for a time.

For fans of Where’d you go, Bernadette or slightly absurdist, campy humor. Dog of the North is a van, a sometimes-home and a metaphor for the transient Penny. Broke, divorced and mourning the disappearance of her parents five years earlier, she embarks on a (mis) adventure involving her brilliant but deranged grandmother, her accountant and other caricatures of characters to forge a new path. Funny as hell.