The Lost Dog

If you enjoy A.S. Byatt's books, you may enjoy this book. It is richly themed and multi-faceted in characterization, action and ideas. I appreciated how incidences and characters inter-act and effect each other. I also appreciated that some story lines were not tied up nicely and solved. I enjoyed the writing, the presentation of the art world, and the adherence to Henry James' quote that "the whole of anything cannot be told." As an artist, I chuckled and then gave much thought to the fact that Nelly --the artist-- was selling photographed paintings rather than the real thing. I don't think that the author just threw this in as an interesting are story. It has meaning in both plot and themes. I was only bored by the author's over wrought presentation of feces.

A richly imagined exploration of the myriad connections between art and life, The Lost Dog is part mystery and also part character study of one man, an immigrant in one country and an isolated, misunderstood child in another. Tom Loxley is haunted by his childhood in India, a glamorous, doting mother and a father who although extravagant and a drunk, is able to bring his family to make a new life for themselves in 1970's Australia. It is these sights, sounds and smells of his ancestral home which shape Tom's attitides to his new country. Even in his mid-thirties, working as a semi-successful literary professor, while also working on a book about Henry James, Tom critically examines those around him, still emotionally attached to his octogenarian mother Iris whose arthritic knees are steadily diminishing her quality of life, and later, his ex-wife, who over the years after their divorce has treated Tom with a mixture of disdain and condescending authority. Only when Tom suddenly loses his dog in the Australian bush while working on his book, the last vision he sees is of the animal lean and white, rust-spotched, springing up a bank, does his story spring back to seven months earlier, beginning with a painting he sees st an art gallery he hadn't entered in the four years since his wife left. It is here at a group show of four young artists that Tom meets the Chinese-Australian artist and photographer, Nelly Zhang who instantly attracts him with her mysteriousness and ambiguities. Soon enough he's visiting Nelly at The Preserve, a ramshackle warehouse which serves as her home and studio, which also she shares with her son teenage son, Rory and the beautiful fellow artist Yelena, who "men circle like moons." But it is Nelly that Tom is most emotionally attracted too, even as she stages elaborate scenarios that mimic the solidarity of truth. Tom is a man who seems to exist in a remote world, his days carefully constructed, his concerns about Iris's failing health threatening to consume him, and then there's the problem of what to do about his lost dog. Certainly, the days he spends at The Preserve, make him realise how acute his loneliness has been, this tightly knit collection of people offering companionship and conversation and reflecting Tom's increasing need for Nelly and for the world that she had created and the sense of being caught up in her wide spate of imaginative work. But in the end Nelly's indistinct world seems to offer more questions than answers: even as she steadily endears herself to Tom, there are ambiguities eddying her surface, the sweetness that ran in her depths, a detailing of good fortune, precluding a failed relationship, a famous husband who went missing, and rumours of an unhappy marriage where there were always arguments about money. As Tom tries to piece together all these bit and pieces, the little unconnected facts about Nelly's life, while also longing to know more about Nelly's short-lived marriage, he also