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Recently a couple of old friends from the island stayed with us for a few days. When I mentioned that I was going back to university in January with a focus on philosophy, Sheila told me I would enjoy a book called Fifteen Dogs. Her description made it sound interesting so I picked up a copy. I just finished reading it and it is nothing short of amazing. A gem of a book.The book is an apologue, a story that conveys some moral lessons and uses animals as its protagonists. The most famous apologues are Aesop's Fables. But they can be long or short and the most famous of modern apologues is George Orwell's Animal Farm.
Fifteen Dogs starts with an unusual bet. The Greek gods Hermes and Apollo are having drinks in a Toronto bar and talking about human intelligence and happiness. Apollo is not overly fond of the human race as such. He sees them as dour and generally unhappy. The source of this misery is their intelligence or ability to think. Hermes disagrees. He has always liked humans and finds them fascinating.
As they leave the bar, Hermes wonders what it would be like if animals had human intelligence. "I wonder if they'd be as unhappy as humans," answers Apollo. "Some humans are unhappy; others aren't. Their intelligence is a difficult gift."
Apollo proposes a wager, a year's servitude, "that animals - any animal you choose - would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they had human intelligence."
They also decide that they won't be able to decide whether one of the animals is happy until its death. Does it die happy? Hermes gets Apollo to agree that if just one dies happy, he has won the bet.
The bet is on. They pass a nearby veterinary clinic and passing through its walls (they are gods, after all) Apollo confers human intelligence on fifteen dogs at the back of the clinic.
The fifteen dogs are listed at the beginning of the book in a Dramatis Canes. They include a variety of dogs, large and small, old and young, and of various different breeds.
As the dogs wake up, they discover their new intelligence, and one of them figures out how to unlatch their cages. They escape en masse from the clinic. And so the story begins.
Now these are dogs. They still have dog instincts and dog memories of their past. But now they have something more and it is unsettling to some of them.
The fact that the bet won't be fully resolved until the creatures die makes for a very powerful and poignant tale. The immediate aftermath of their escape sees three dogs left behind at the back door of the clinic. Agatha, an old labradoodle is too old and sick to join the others. She had been left at the clinic to be put down. Two others had been at the clinic for minor ailments. They stayed with Agatha. In the morning they are discovered by clinic staff. The two sick mutts are treated and released to their owners where their new-found intelligence does not go well.
One of the by-products of intelligence is an awareness of time. A day spent doing nothing while the master was away used to be tolerable, but now became unbearable.
The remaining twelve hightail it to a retreat, a coppice in High Park. A new language distinguished from the simple dog language of barks, snarls and yips evolves. A language spoken as variations on the old dog language but with nuances. One of the dogs, Prince, wholeheartedly embraces the new language and becomes a poet, speaking flowery phrases. Some of the dogs admire Prince's brilliance, others despise him for it.
Four of the dogs decide that this new way of thinking goes against what it means to be a dog. They decide they want to ignore their new-found talents as much as possible and embrace the old ways of doghood.
Atticus, a mastiff and the largest of the dogs, takes aside Majnoun, a large black poodle and they discuss the issue.
"Some of us," said Atticus, "believe the best way is to ignore the new thinking and stop using the new words."
"How can you silence the new words inside?"
"No one can silence the words inside, but you can ignore them. We can go back to the old ways of being. This new thinking leads away from the pack, but a dog is no dog if he does not belong."
"I do not agree," said Majnoun. "We have this new way. It has been given to us. Why should we not use it? Maybe there is a reason for our difference."
And here the story takes on an air that led me to believe it would evolve as a variation on William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the famous story of British schoolboys who become stranded on an island. That tale is a devastating account of the descent into tribalism, dominance, and cruelty by the strong over the weak. A cruelty that ends in murder.
The four dogs indeed set out to purge the group of the ones embracing the new way.
Majnoun is attacked by the four and left for dead. But he does not die. He is found by a human, taken for veterinary treatment and over a period of six months, recovers.
Majnoun's is the most powerful and interesting of the stories. His new owners are a couple, Nira and Miguel. He is closest to Nira and spends much time with her. He starts to understand English beyond the ability of ordinary dogs. And he learns to actually speak English. The first time he uses it with Nira, it is a simple answer to a question she asks - "yes". And her initial reaction - she faints. After she recovers, another word from Majnoun has her flee in terror.
Slowly she comes around. But Majnoun has decided not to speak to her. They develop a silent language. She ask questions and Majnoun nods or shakes his head. Somehow they communicate a lot with this silent language.
Partway through the story of Majnoun and Nira is an interlude when they encounter another dog from the pack - Benjy. Benjy is a very clever and very manipulative beagle. As a small dog, he was a submissive in the old pack that remained after Majnoun was attacked. But he didn't like his role and how he used his wily and conniving nature is both a lesson in street smarts and vengeance. A friendly pooch to all appearances, Benjy is a nasty piece of work, in some ways more evil than the original four alpha dogs that organized the purge.
Benjy tries to ingratiate himself into the trio of Majnoun, Nira and Miguel but Majnoun, as the larger dog, ejects Benjy for his mischievous conniving.
Benjy next encounters Prince the poet. Prince had survived the purge through the intervention of Hermes. But now an exile, Prince was wary of developing another lasting relationship with a human master. He had managed to develop relationships with various humans who feed him and occasionally take him in for a while. But he is free to come and go.
Benjy ingratiates himself into one of these homes with a couple named Clare and Randy. Like Benjy, this couple are opportunists with little moral character. They adopt Benjy and give Prince the boot. But the relationship between the three explores some new territory and brings in a comic element. Benjy, as a dog, determines that Randy is the alpha male, the leader of their little pack. But Randy is a masochist and likes to be dominated in the bedroom, complete with whips and chains and all the accoutrements. This is very confusing to Benjy who loses all respect for Randy.
Clare and Randy eventually become Benjy's undoing.
Returning to the story of Majnoun: after a few years, a quarrel develops over status - Majnoun acknowledges Miguel as the leader of their little "pack" - which causes a rift and Majnoun leaves. But Zeus himself intervenes and persuades Majnoun to reconcile with Nira. And he does, speaking directly to her in English.
Their remaining years together are brilliantly and lovingly described - conversations both philosophical and intimate. Majnoun asks about her relationship with Miguel. He does not understand the concept of romantic love at all. But it is clear that he is, in fact, deeply in love with Nira, though not in a sexual way. It is not simply a love of a dog for its master as Majnoun sees Nira as an equal. The lives of the three become deeply intertwined, though Majnoun and Nira have agreed that he will not speak aloud in front of Miguel, who just thinks of him as a clever dog.
How this part of the story ends is deeply emotional and deeply affecting. Majnoun might be just a dog, but I cared for him as much as much as I have for any human character in fiction. Only a heartless person can fail to be affected by this story in my opinion. (But I confess, I am very much a sentimentalist.)
Eventually we are left with just one dog left alive - Prince the poet. His story makes up the last chapter of the book. His back story is told - his birth and first master, Kim. A relationship he cherished and still remembers fondly.
As the years go by and Prince gets old and nearing the end of his life, his one true love is poetry. He never learned English but has an abiding affection for the elaborate and modified dog language that he and the pack had had. His great fear is that his poetry will be lost to posterity as he is the last of his kind (the dogs with human intelligence).
Prince is also the last chance for Hermes to win the bet, and Apollo does his best to scuttle this possibility. Suffice to say that Prince, now old and blind, faces a perilous quest to return to one of the homes that sometimes takes him in, a home with four kindly humans he knows will care for him.
Does Prince die happy? Does Hermes win the bet? Or does he die unhappy, giving the win to Apollo?
For the reader, who wins the bet is really irrelevant. What is relevant is the insights we have come to about both dogs and humans. And mostly about love and what it means.
We have often heard the story of the faithful dog who pines after the death of his master, the dog who sits on his master's grave, forlorn and lost. Dogs can and do love deeply. But humans often take this for granted. I am not a dog person, preferring the company of cats. But the book gave me a great empathy for the lives of dogs.
In my own life I often wonder how Rufio, the dog owned by my son-in-law, must feel now that he is playing second fiddle to our grand daughter. I wonder how one of my cats felt when she was brought to the veterinarian's to be put down. She was twenty - old for a cat. And she sometimes had her front legs collapse from under her. She was also a bit skittish with strangers and struggled with the vet. I am always haunted by the thought that her last moments were unhappy ones.
We tend to take love for granted, whether the love of pets or humans. But the depth and beauty of a loving relationship, as well as the cruelty and vicissitudes of life are explored in a beguiling way in this wonderful book. There is much to think about.
As an aside for libertarians, since this is a libertarian blog, the book subtly raises the question of individualism versus collectivism. Does human intelligence give rise to individualism? Certainly the dog's nature is that of a pack animal. It is instinctive, built into its DNA. When the dogs are endowed with human intelligence, an immediate conflict develops between those who embrace the individual freedom, primarily freedom of thought, that this change brings, and the inherent collective, pack nature that causes others to reject this gift, and indeed to turn on those who embrace it.
Benjy the conniver embraced this freedom whole-heartedly, but only to use it to his advantage without regard to scruples or morality. Prince embraced it in a positive way. He gloried in the ability to think and create.
As humans, we too have a choice. We can embrace our individuality, or we can become pack animals. With humans there is no pack instinct. Nevertheless, for some humans, the pack is everything. It is an on-going philosophical struggle. Fifteen Dogs does not directly address this issue. Indeed it does not offer answers. It merely shows us ideas in action and leaves us to draw our own conclusions.
Fifteen Dogs deservedly won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize. I strongly recommend this book for the dog lover and for the lover of philosophy.
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