The Plague Dogs

Imagine that the world is "a great, flat wheel with a myriad spokes of water, trees, and grass, for ever turning," and each spoke is a different animal. At the hub, a man lashes the animals with a whip to make them keep turning the wheel, but it's unnecessary because the wheel turns on its own. What he should be doing is adjusting the animals from one side to another to keep the wheel balanced. This is the vision that Snitter has as he is finally on the verge of death in Richard Adams's The Plague Dogs.

This book is not for the faint hearted. It's a dog's version of Angela's Ashes where things go from bad to worse to even worse to, "Okay, that's enough already," to the point where things are so bad that the author feels the need to have a poetic conversation with the reader about the nature of the world:

"It's a bad world--for well you know
But after all, another slave--
It's easy come and easy go.
We've used them now, like Boycott. They've
Fulfilled their part. The story gave
amusement. Now as best I can
I'll round it off . . . ."

Boycott is the lead scientist at the animal research station from which the two dogs, Snitter and Rowf, escape. Adams is telling the reader that if he just wants a happy ending to a nice story, then we have used the dogs for entertainment, just as Dr. Boycott has for his obscure scientific purposes. You can't read this book and remain indifferent to the plight of animals subjected to scientific tests. Adams's criticism extends also to members of the media who blow stories out of proportion and create conflict in order to increase circulation and members of the government who use media hype to advance their own political careers. In the mean time the true stories are utterly neglected and the innocent suffer.

While all of the political stuff is compelling, The Plague Dogs largely succeeds because of its vivid sense of place, Snitter's wonderfully confused poetic mental meanderings, and the author's romantic love of all things feral. Adams's devotion to the Lake District is inscribed on every page. When I finished the book, I googled pictures of the landscape in the book and compared them with the maps. I was delighted to find that the mental pictures Adams had given me were amazingly accurate. Often, this harshly beautiful landscape is described through Snitter's point of view. A scientist has cut part of Snitter's brain out in order to confuse his sense of the subjective and the objective. Snitter often feels like he is outside himself and part of the landscape, and other times he feels like parts of the landscape are somehow inside him. As awful as the surgery is, it gives him a mystical experience of everything around him. By the end of the book, I loved him as much as Rowf does and really wanted them to survive. Both Snitter and Rowf try to become wild, learning from a wily fox how to survive. Adams praises the dark and wild as part of a nature man wrongly tries to suppress in favor of a Heaven where all is light and tame: "What will then become of your dreams, and of the phantasms that your own heart has summoned out of firelight and the dark?"

This book is not nearly as great a novel as Watership Down. The Plague Dogs feels much more didactic. It may just be that certain issues are so emotionally charged that the only appropriate response to them is an angry tirade. The book contains passages that I wanted to skim over though. The message was not seamlessly woven into the story. Though the descriptive passages are probably too long to keep high school students interested, I recommend the book to adults.