The Lost Dog
Michelle De Kretser
De Kretser (The Hamilton Case) presents an intimate and subtle look at Tom Loxley, a well-intentioned but solipsistic Henry James scholar and childless divorcé, as he searches for his missing dog in the Australian bush. While the overarching story follows Tom's search during a little over a week in November 2001, flashbacks reveal Tom's infatuation with Nelly Zhang, an artist tainted by scandal-from her controversial paintings to the disappearance and presumed murder of her husband, Felix, a bond trader who got into some shady dealings. As Tom puts the finishing touches on his book about James and the uncanny and searches for his dog, de Kretser fleshes out Tom's obsession with Nelly-from the connection he feels to her incendiary paintings (one exhibition was dubbed Nelly's Nasties in the press) to the sleuthing about her past that he's done under scholarly pretenses. Things progress rapidly, with a few unexpected turns thrown in as Tom and Nelly get together, the murky circumstances surrounding Felix's disappearance are (somewhat) cleared up and the matter of the missing dog is settled. De Kretser's unadorned, direct sentences illustrate her characters' flaws and desires, and she does an admirable job of illuminating how life and art overlap in the 21st century.
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‘A captivating read… I could read this book 10 times and get a phew perspective each time. It’s simply riveting.’ Caroline Davison, Glasgow Evening Times
‘… remarkably rich and complex… De Kretser has a wicked, exacting, mocking eye…While very funny in places, The Lost Dog is also a subtle and understated work, gently eloquent and thought-provoking… a tender and thoughtful book, a meditation on loss and fi nding, on words and wordlessness, and on memory, identity, history and modernity.’ The Dominion Post
‘Michelle de Kretser is the fastest rising star in Australia ’s literary firmament… stunningly beautiful.’ Metro
‘… a wonderful tale of obsession, art, death, loss, human failure and past and present loves. One of Australia ’s best contemporary writers.’
Harper’s Bazaar
‘In many ways this book is wonderfully mysterious. The whole concept of modernity juxtaposed with animality is a puzzle that kept this reader on edge for the entire reading. The Lost Dog is an intelligent and insightful book that will guarantee de Kretser a loyal following.’ Mary Philip, Courier-Mail
‘Engrossing… De Kretser confidently marshals her reader back and forth through the book’s complex flashback structure, keeping us in suspense even as we read simply for the pleasure of her prose… De Kretser knows when to explain and when to leave us deliciously wondering.’ Seattle Times
‘De Kretser continues to build a reputation as a stellar storyteller whose prose is inventive, assured, gloriously colourful and deeply thoughtful. The Lost Dog is a love story and a mystery and, at its best, possesses an accessible and seemingly effortless sophistication… a compelling book, simultaneously playful and utterly serious.’ Patrick Allington, Adelaide Advertiser ‘A nuanced portrait of a man in his time. The novel, like Tom, is multicultural, intelligent, challenging and, ultimately, rewarding.’
Library Journal
‘This book is so engaging and thought-provoking and its subject matter so substantial that the reader notices only in passing how funny it is.’ Kerryn Goldsworthy, Sydney Morning Herald
‘… rich, beautiful, shocking, affecting’ Clare Press, Vogue
‘… a cerebral, enigmatic reflection on cultures and identity… Ruminative and roving in form… intense, immaculate.’ Kirkus Reviews
‘De Kretser is as piercing in her observations of a city as Don DeLillo is at his best… this novel is a love song to a city… a delight to read, revealing itself in small, gem-like scenes.’ NZ Listener
‘… de Kretser’s trademark densely textured language, rich visual imagery and depth of description make The Lost Dog a delight to savour as well as a tale to ponder.’ Australian Bookseller and Publisher
‘A remarkably good novel, a story about human lives and the infi nite mystery of them.’ Next
‘Confident, meticulous plotting, her strong imagination and her precise, evocative prose. Like The Hamilton Case, The Lost Dog opens up rich vistas with its central idea and introduces the reader to a world beyond its fictional frontiers.’ Lindsay Duguid, Sunday Times
“[a] clever, engrossing novel… De Kretser’s beautifully shaded book moves between modern day Australia and post-colonial India. Mysteries and love affairs are unfolded but never fully resolved, and as Tom searches for his dog, it becomes apparent that its whereabouts is only one of the puzzles in his life.” Tina Jackson, Metro
‘A richly layered literary text.’ Emmanuelle Smith, Big Issue
Michelle de Kretser
The Lost Dog
For Gus, of course
The whole of anything can never be told.
Henry James, Notebooks
Tuesday
Afterwards, he would remember paddocks stroked with light. He would remember the spotted trunks of gum trees; the dog arching past to sniff along the fence.
He cleaned his teeth at the tap on the water tank. The house in the bush had no running water, no electricity. It was only sporadically inhabited and had grown grimy with neglect. But Tom Loxley, spitting into the luxuriant weeds by the tap that November morning, thought, Light, air, space, silence. The Benedictine luxuries.
He placed his toothpaste and brush on a log at the foot of the steps; and later forgot where he had left them. Night would send him blundering about a room where torchlight swung across the wall, and what he could find and what he needed were not the same thing.
On the kitchen table, beside Tom’s laptop, was the printout of his book, Meddlesome Ghosts: Henry James and the Uncanny. He remembered the elation he had felt the previous evening, drafting the final paragraph; the impression that he had nailed it all down at last. It was to this end that he had rented Nelly Zhang’s house for four days, days in which he had written fluently and with conviction; to his surprise, because he was in the habit of proceeding hesitantly, and the book had been years in the making.
He owed this small triumph to Nelly, who had said, ‘It’s what you need. No distractions, and you won’t have to worry about kennels.’
This evidence of her concern had moved Tom. At the same time, he thought, She wants the money. The web of their relations was shot through with these ambivalences, shade and bright twined with such cunning that their pattern never settled.
His jacket hung on the back of a chair. He put it on, then paused: shuffled pages, squared off the stack of paper, touched what he had accomplished. James’s dictum caught his eye: Experience is never limited, and it is never complete.
When Tom called, raising his voice, the dog went on nosing through leaves and damp grass. It was their last morning there; the territory was no longer new. Yet whenever the dog was allowed outside, he would race to the far end of the yard and start working his way along the fence. Instinct, deepened over centuries, compelled him to check boundaries; drew him to the edges of knowledge.
Afterwards, Tom would remember the dog ignoring him, and the spurt of impatience he had felt. The dog had to be walked and the house packed up before the long drive back to the city. He was keen to get moving while the weather held. So he didn’t pat the dog’s soft head when he strode to the fence and reached for him.
The dog was standing still, one forepaw raised; listening.
Tea-coloured puddles sprawled on the track. A cockatoo fl ying up from a sapling dislodged a rhinestone spray. It was a wet spring even in the city, and in these green hills, it rained and rained.
The dog’s paw-pads were shining jet. He sniffed, and sneezed, and plunged into dithering grass. A twenty-foot rope kept him from
farmland and forest while affording him greater freedom than his lead.
The man picking his way through rutted mud at the other end of the rope disliked the cold. Tom Loxley had spent two-thirds of his life in a cool southern city. But his childhood had been measured in monsoons, and the first windows he knew had contained the Arabian Sea. Free hand shoved deep in his pocket, he held himself tight against the morning.
Light rubbed itself over the paddocks. It struck silver from the cockatoo and splintered the windscreen of a toy truck threading up the mountain where trees went down to steel. But what Tom took from the scene was the thrust and weight of leaves, the season’s green upswinging. Over time, his eye had grown accustomed to the bleached pigments of the continent where he had made his life. But love takes shape before we know it. On a damp, plumed coast in India, Tom’s fi rst encounter with landscape had been dense with leaves. A faultless place for him would always be a green one.
He glanced back at Nelly’s house. Afterwards, he would remember his sense that everything-the pepper tree by the gate, the sloping driveway, the broad blue sky itself-was holding its breath, gathered to the moment. The impression was forceful, but Tom’s thoughts were busy with Nelly as he had once seen her: astride a sunny wall in the suburb where they both lived, a striped cat pouring himself through her arms.
In the corner of his eye, something blurred. At the same time, the rope skidded through his fi ngers. His head snapped around to see grey fur moving fast, and the dog in pursuit, the end to which sinew and nerve and tissue had always been building.
Tom swooped for the rope, and clawed at air. On the hillside above the track, the dog was swallowed by leaves.
Birdsong, and eucalyptus-scented air.
A lean white dog, rust-splotched, springing up a bank.
Things Tom Loxley would remember.
It had begun, seven months earlier, with a painting.
April becalmed in hazy, slanted light. Tom clipped on the dog’s lead and they left his flat to walk in streets where houses were packed like wheat. Windows were turning yellow. Dahlias showed off like sunsets. On an autumn evening in the city, Tom looked sideways at other people’s lives.
At a gallery he hadn’t entered in the four years since his wife left, long sash windows had been pushed up; there were smokers on the terraces with glasses in their hands. Tom tied the dog to the garden side of the ornate iron railings and went up the steps.
A group show: four young artists. Their friends and relatives were congratulatory and numerous in the two rooms on the ground floor. Tom drank cold wine and looked at paintings. They seemed unremarkable but he knew enough to know he couldn’t tell.
From the street it had seemed there were fewer people upstairs. He had his glass refilled by a pierced girl with ruffl es of hair parted low on the side, and started up the stairs. But something made him glance back. She was looking up at him, her face gleaming and amused; and he realised, with a little lurch of perception, that she was a boy.
The fi rst-floor room that ran the width of the building contained work unrelated to the exhibition below. A well-fleshed man stood in front of a painting, blocking it from view.
‘Eddie’s still channelling Peter, it seems.’ He had a thin, carrying voice. A dark boy standing beside him snickered.
On the short wall opposite the door was an almost-abstract landscape at which Tom looked for four or five minutes; a long time. Then he went out onto the balcony and saw a couple leaving the gallery stop to fondle the dog’s floppy ears. The word Beefmaster passed on the side of a van.
When Tom stepped back through the fl oor-length window, the large man was in the centre of the room. More people had attached themselves to his group. He gazed out over their heads; his face was round and turnip-white. The pallor made his eyes, which were very dark, appear hollow. He murmured as Tom passed. There was a small explosion of laughter.
Tom gulped wine in front of the picture opposite the door. His scalp hummed. He thought, I am the wrong kind of thing. He thought, I don’t belong here. The adverb having a wide application.
By an act of will, he directed his attention to the landscape in front of him. His formal training in art history was limited to two undergraduate years. They had left him a vocabulary, formal strategies for thinking about images. He believed himself to possess a set of basic analytical tools for operating upon a work of art.
Faced with this picture, he thought only, How beautiful. And relived, at once, the frustration that had edged his youthful efforts, shadowing the pleasure he took in looking at art. Pictures belong to the world of things. They cannot be contained in language. Tom was still susceptible to their immanent hostility. It had persuaded him, as a student, to concentrate on literature. There he was at home in the medium. For all their shifting play, narratives did not exceed his grasp. He paid them the tribute of lucid investigation and they unfolded before him.
An English voice said, ‘Isn’t it completely wonderful?’
A milky woman with crimson pigtails was smiling down at him. ‘I was sure it was you.’ She went up on her toes; she was wearing beaded mesh slippers. Up and down she went again, holding out her hand.
The rocking was a boon. It identified a party in the summer; a long woman rising and falling. ‘We met at Esther’s, didn’t we?’ Tom took her cool, boneless fingers. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember…?’
‘Imogen Halliday. But everyone just says Mogs.’
Mogs was wearing a kimono fashioned from what might have been hessian, slashed here and there to show a silky green undergarment. She said, ‘How is Esther? I’ve been simply swamped.’
‘I’ve been out of touch myself.’
Two years earlier, Tom Loxley and Esther Kade had been deputed by their respective university departments, Textual Studies and Art History, to attend a weekend conference on Multimedia and Interactive Teaching Strategies. Under the circum stances, alcohol and sex had seemed no more than survival mechanisms. Later both regretted the affair, which out lived the conference by only an awkward encounter or two. But Esther now felt obliged to invite Tom to her parties to show there were no hard feelings; for the same reason, he felt obliged to go.
Interactive strategies, he thought.
‘Isn’t life mad? But I adore working here.’ Mogs swayed above him, waving a hand on which a green jewel shone.
Christ, thought Tom. It’s real.
Mogs was, in her own way, catching.
‘I was looking at you: you were transfi xed. Isn’t she a marvel?’ The slippers rose and fell. ‘Nelly Zhang,’ said Mogs’s soft English voice.
Tom nodded. He had read the name, which meant nothing to him, on the list he had picked up at the door. And noted that the picture was not for sale.
‘ Carson ’s known her forever. Since before… you know, everything. She’s over there with him, actually. In the black… tunic, I think you’d say.’
Tom turned his head and saw a woman in a loose, dark dress that fell to mid-calf. Red beads about her neck, her twisted hair secured with a scarlet crayon.
‘Really exciting. A painting. An early work, of course-she was barely out of art school. From Carson ’s own collection. Such a privilege just to see it now that Nelly only shows photographs of her work.’
Mogs was all right. But Tom wished she would go away. He wanted to be left alone with the picture.
Outside the gallery, a spotlight fell across a strip of grass where Nelly Zhang squatted, scratching the dog’s chest.
‘Hail dog,’ she said. ‘You speckled beast.’ She peered at his name tag. Her sooty fringe made an almost shocking line against her powdered skin.
The dog wagged his tail. His good looks habitually elicited caresses, titbits. Experience had taught him confidence in his ability to charm.
Nelly stood up. Tom was not a tall man, but her head was scarcely higher than his shoulder.
She said, ‘Lovely dog.’
He remembered that his wife used to refer to the dog a
s a chick magnet.
Nelly was lighting a thin cigarette. The pungency of cloves and behind it-Tom’s sense of smell was acute-a bodily aroma.
The dog tilted his spotted muzzle and sniffed. Tom bent to untie his leash.
‘That looks professional.’
‘Just a quick-release tie.’
‘A man who knows his knots. So much rarer than one who knows the ropes.’
He didn’t say, I was lonely growing up.
He didn’t say, String is cheap.
But it might have begun long, long before that evening in Carson Posner’s gallery. It might have been historical.
War took an Englishman called Arthur Loxley to the East and in time returned him with two medals and a shattered knee to ruined Coventry. His mother had been killed in the fi rst raid; to his father he had never had much to say. A trio of sisters inspected him as if their free trial period might expire and leave them stuck with him forever. At some point each took him aside to ask what he had brought her from the Orient. Their blue eyes glittered with the understanding that the world had been made safe for the business of acquisition.
He was twenty-six, and his knee ached all through the winter. But the map was still stained pink. Pink people could move about it as they pleased; could rule a line on it and bring nations into being. Arthur returned to India, where that kind of thing was causing a commotion. He paid no attention to it, having had his fill of history. What he was after, then and for the rest of his life, was a bolt-hole, with drink thrown in. There was also the memory of a twenty-four-hour leave he had spent in the whorehouses of Bombay. A Javanese half-caste with spongy golden thighs was instructing him in the art of cunnilingus when boots thundered past in the street and a Glaswegian voice bellowed that Rangoon had fallen. Thereafter, news of defeat would always induce in him a mild erotic stir.
Having drifted down the Malabar Coast he fetched up in Mangalore, where he was taken on as an inventory clerk by Mr Ashok Lal, an exporter of cashew nuts with a godown in the port. When Arthur looked up from his ledger, boats rocked on green water.
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