‘Humans come and go ... a pet is totally ours’

It’s a mystery even to dog lovers themselves as to why the loss of a mere pet can sometimes be more devastating than the death of a friend or family member. Markus Zusak believes he has the answer.

The author Markus Zusak and two of the three wild dogs

It’s a mystery even to dog lovers themselves as to why the loss of a mere pet can sometimes be more devastating than the death of a friend or family member. Markus Zusak believes the answer is “because humans come and go – they have more connections, they’re out more in the world, out in their own lives. But a pet is totally ours. They stay. Only we know them best. Only we really understood them. Only we could forgive them.”

Three Wild Dogs is Marc Zusak’s very personal account of his relationship with Reuben and Archer (and, later, Frosty), big hounds whose loving tongues almost make up for the trouble they do with their teeth.

 

Largely unpopular with walkers of caboodles in Sydney’s Centennial Park, Zusak’s dogs chase everything from cyclists to lawnmowers, and harass possums, piano teachers and people who refuse to accept Zusak’s apologies.

Interestingly, the animals’ appetites do not appear to discern between excrement and the ­author’s own manuscripts.

It’s no great spoiler to reveal dogs cark it at the end of Three Wild Dogs – Zusak tells us himself in the opening of this, his first step from literary fiction to fact. He was a similar spoilsport in the first few pages of his breakout World War II epic, The Book Thief (2006) but that didn’t stop readers weeping in over 60 languages when they finished the final page. It works here, too, though through no great sweat from the author – books about dying mutts have made tattooed truckers sob from Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller (1956) to W. Bruce Cameron’s A Dog’s Purpose (2010), and there won’t be a dry moustache in the house when Reuben buys the farm at the end of Three Wild Dogs.

What is a surprise about this memoir is that the writing is, by Zusak’s own standards, pretty pedestrian.

The young writer who critics, for nearly two decades, have hailed as a wunderkind of symbolism and metaphor gives us no such stuff in Three Wild Dogs, the style more reminiscent of a Sunday columnist than a literary chin-stroker – more Kathy Lette than Kathy Acker.

Sentences repeatedly begin with “Sure”, then proceed with what we were meant to be sure about, before the predictable “but” reminds us we shouldn’t have been so sure in the first place, and Zusak’s obsession with pithy parenthetical asides, sometimes swallowing several paragraphs, serves little purpose but to have the reader wonder whether the dogs are inside or out.

There are several possible reasons for this.

Having begun his career as an author of “young adult” fiction (his first three novels were aimed directly at teens), Zusak, a former schoolteacher, knew the minds for whom he was writing, but The Book Thief bounced everyone’s bananas, possibly even Zusak’s own.

A tale of horror told through a child’s eye, The Book Thief, which was originally marketed at kids, was no more a children’s novel than Pan’s Labyrinth belonged on the same marquee as Toy Story, and it may be the book’s runaway success has had Zusak wondering who the hell he’s writing for anyway. Or it may be that Zusak, an inventive and original novelist, simply stinks at memoir, his gifts deserting him once hard reality has placed his imagination on a leash.

It has happened before, with the best of them. Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird (1965), unquestionably one of the most remarkable pieces of Holocaust fiction ever published, banged out along the way a series of personal essays published posthumously as Passing By (1992), a collection so dull and ­pretentious as to be a worthy addition to the bonfires of Frankfurt in 1933.

When it comes to reportage, the artist’s lens can sometimes be as useful as a banjo at a funeral.

But there’s another possibility. Zusak embraced his literary superstardom when it came in 2006, the next few exhilarating years seeing him seated on august literary councils and flying into a hero’s welcome on every continent except Antarctica (yet to host a memorable writers’ festival). But it came at a cost, his anticipated follow-up, Bridge of Clay (2018), taking him 13 excruciating years to complete. Zusak lays some of the blame on life’s joyous obstacles – kids, new houses, renovations, and, of course, those damned dogs – but he also hints The Book Thief may have been aptly titled indeed, the “fear” and “doubt” wrought by Zusak’s own Uber novel lurking in every shadow, spooking him away from writing another. “Victory,” said defeated French General Andre Beaufre in 1973’s The World at War, “can be a very dangerous opportunity.”

Zusak was buggered if he was going to make the same mistake again, to allow his own reputation to cripple a love letter he felt he simply had to author. “I couldn’t bear the thought of failing them,” he writes, though not of his critics, the literati, or even his fans. “I couldn’t fail those dogs.”

And so, Markus closed his eyes and squirted out Three Wild Dogs in comparatively record time. To hell with literary pretensions – this is a diarist’s remembrance for his wife and children, lest they forget, because “only we dragged him down stairways, and up steps, on mattresses … only we sat with him on the warm smoky floor when his heart beat its last … And only we watched on, all those years before, as he slowed down his walking pace to match the girl who loved him”.

In the end, it is not the frolics, but death that is Zusak’s bag. It narrated The Book Thief, littered The Messenger and curtained the stage in Bridge of Clay.

The joy brought to the world by Reuben and Archer is fun to read, but it’s the sadness they left behind that we will remember.

For dog lovers, critics and grown men alike, it’s enough to make you weep.

Jack Marx loves his dog. Also his wife, but yes, his dog.