Even the Dogs: A Novel Paperback – May 12, 2020

This novel is astonishingly beautiful, powerful and moving. The writing is beyond superb. There are touches of James Joyce about the style of the narrative as it weaves its way between particular dialects, speech patterns and thought processes, echoing those of the characters themselves. It really is a phenomenal piece of work.At the start, Robert is dead and the voices who seemingly narrate the story may be ghosts or memories or a group of unseen observers who provide a sort of Greek Chorus commentary on the character's life and death. As in McGregor's 'If nobody speaks of remarkable things' (one of my favourite books), it is the poetry of the everyday that comes through and at every single level of the book.And it is truly the world of the 'underdog' that McGregor portrays. The world of benefits and alcoholism and heroin addiction and holding out for hope when there's little hope to be had and climbing through windows and waiting for giros and rehab and scripts and getting the next fix, the next dig.Amongst the needles and sickness and bruises and veins are all the human faces and the wounds of their lives. Some are ex-soldiers and we see glimpses of the passing horrors they witnessed in the Falklands, Afghanistan, Bosnia. There is an incredible passage which follows the trail of heroin from war scenes in Afghanistan to the needles puncturing the veins of the characters in the novel. It is a staggering passage, as is every moment in this book.'Even the Dogs' is so beautiful, it hurts. It's a novel with such sensitivity and force that its impact is immediate and painful and poignant and human and unforgettable. Read it. Savour it. Read it.

This tale of addiction warrants special treatment and receives it. The style grows on you so that complete sentences start to seem aberrational epecially at the end of

I found that the author was much more focused on the style and the actual "speech flow" than on the characters

Creative use of discourse giving a chilling insight into the life of addicts whose life centers around finding the next fix.

This book will not be for everyone -- it is too dark and hope-less -- but I thought it was brilliant. The writing is like poetry, and we are drawn forward by the mystery of how the narrating voices connect and to whom those voices belong. There is a suspicious death to be investigated, and we want to know the outcome of the investigation (as do the disembodied voices), but in the meantime we are immersed in a dirty dark confusing world of drugs and alcohol, despair, numbness and waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Even the dogs wait.Wonderfully written, Even the Dogs is a worthy recipient of the 2012 International Dublin IMPAC Literary Award.

The novel starts promisingly enough, with a middle-aged man, Robert's lonely death in his flat, and the reader starts to piece together the pieces of his life through his friends and acquaintances. It also boasts a unique multi-character POV narrative, with a greek-chorus perspective as they look on as observers from when the police find his body, to the journey to the morgue, where a gorily-detailed post-mortem is conducted on Robert's body, even as the chorus simultaneously delivers flashbacks on Robert and his friends and gives an insight into the lives of his friends, an amorphous group of drug addicts that include his estranged daughter Laura, who rather conveniently, congregate in and disperse from his flat, as Robert wastes away on his alcohol addiction and no one really cares.And this is where the novel starts to unravel. Perhaps to reflect the consciousness of the drugged-out characters, the prose begins to fragment and drift into a vaporous muddle, as the focus shifts onto each member of the ensemble cast with their disimilar (and yet seemingly undifferentiated) tales of wasted lives in a downward spiral. The stream-of-consciousness style worked in McGregor's first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, because it read like a prose poem, and the ensemble cast of characters were fleshed out and elicited reader empathy. That was not at all evident in this novel, and I just felt frustrated with the (I suspect, intentionally) opaque, fragmented prose. In the end, the poignancy of Robert's death and the realization that the greek chorus was made of the very ones who had passed on to the afterlife had very little impact on me, which is a major disappointment.

Depressing book. every chapter begins with the corpse in some shape or form. I have enough of this material around me and in theTabloids and this is not my kind of literature. It was the book for the reading Circle and so far no one likes it.

It is hard to rate this book five stars in Amazon terms of "I love it". This isn't really a book you love. It is a hard read because of the content; it is painful and lush and engaging. It is a harsh depiction of that ubiquitous human condition, but it is not a book you take to the beach for some light reading, if that is something that you do.

Dieses Buch ist ein Kunstwerk, das den Leser unter die Haut des jeweiligen Protagonisten schlüpfen lässt. Das ist meistens sehr schmerzhaft. Der Leser gewinnt einen verständnisvolleren Umgang mit den "Gescheiterten" und feflektiert so vielleicht auch die eigene Umgebung ein bisschen genauer.

At first you will find this story difficult to make out, but if you persevere, you will come to understand it.The story is told in fragments of information that you have to piece together. It is told by the invisible people and living people whose lives have fallen through the cracks. They all had and have addictions to drugs or alcohol and all were ignored by the government, who couldn't care less and allowed them to die of their addictions, lack of food and without shelter. Typical of their stories is that of Robert.Between Christmas and New Year, a man's body is found by the police in an abandoned apartment. He had been dead for a while. His name is Robert. He drank all day and did nothing else. Robert is the father of a daughter named Laura, who left with her mother years ago when Laura was very young. The people in the building and surroundings also had and have addictions and lived in squalor. They stayed in hostels, Parkside squats and abandoned apartments.Robert allowed them to stay in his flat in exchange for food. They were all addicted and were not able to make their way out of their addiction. They were totally neglected and as a result, they died.The stories are told by the invisible people who have died and those friends who are still alive, like Danny. After Danny returned from spending a vacation with his brother, which wasn't a happy one, he went to see his friend Robert. When he called out his name, he had no response so he climbed through the kitchen window in the back and saw his friend's body. At the sight, he panicked and ran to tell his friends the news. He began looking for Mike and Robert's daughter Laura. There is also the story of an addict who is preparing a vein on his friend for injection and another story about a soldier who lost a leg and as a result became a drug addict.As Robert's body is taken to the morgue to be examined, investigated and cremated, the police try to figure out the cause of death. Was Robert a victim of foul play or did he die of natural causes? Do they question his friend Danny? As the van pulls away, the invisible people get into the van to be with their friend and to honour him in the way they could. "As the body lies between them, limp and heavy like a roll of carpet being trundled out to the city dump. It shouldn't be like this. There should be a band, TV cameras and we should raise him up on our shoulders."In their sudden deaths, they are treated with more respect it seems than they ever were in their short lives.Although this book is very sad to read, I loved the writing which is unconventional, lyrical and captivating. There are paragraphs in the book that end with unfinished sentences, which makes the story even more interesting.Jon McGregor's writing is brilliant. I read two of his other books titled If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, which got me hooked, and a book of short stories titled This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To People Like You, which I found to be offbeat and so enjoyable. I will be reading So Many Ways To Begin and I will tell you about it.Jon McGregor's novel Even The Dogs is another WINNER. It merits FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS.Jon McGregor has won the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and has twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

This is a slim novel which nevertheless makes a "full meal" as a reading experience, and takes a lot of time to read - you can't skim, due to the emotional and stylistic density of the prose.It's very beautiful and, I thought, written with real emotional/psychological acuity. This makes it a difficult read in places, as we spend most of our time down in the real rough edges of life, with people who live "outside the remit" of everything. It's not a bleeding-heart book, though; it's unwavering in its commitment to be true to the characters and to the difficulties in questions of victimhood, "life choices", and addiction.There are no easy answers (much as we would like to think there are) and this book stares the difficulties of Life full in the face.I couldn't help but admire the depth of research the author must have done, and yet it never comes across as "look at all my research".Really brilliant & different.

Encensé par les critiques, cet ouvrage n'a rien d'original. La descente aux enfers des paumés a déjà été dit par Stephen Crane, Jack London avec plus de brio et d'émotion.

A tale of drug and alcohol addiction is unlikely to be a laugh a minute and this certainly isn't. It follows the ghosts of a number of drug addicts who (it appears) have died as a result of a bad batch of heroin, and tells the tale of how they arrived at that point. What makes it good is that all of them are believable characters, the stories are not sentimentally told - the characters just are where they are - and many of the scenes reminded me of the scenes from Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (specifically those involving Septimus, the WW1 veteran with PTSD). Thankfully the author leaves a tiny bit of hope for one of the characters at the end, and I'm glad I read it, but I wouldn't describe it as an 'enjoyable' read.