Great Literary Dogs ...

This week, in a post we arrived at by a rather circuitous route*, we're focussing not on books of the week, but on dogs. We asked staff and departments to nominate their favourite dogs in literature, and here are their responses.  

Mr Hager (whose own dog, Cormac, is named after the late, great American novelist Cormac McCarthy) starts us off:  'Can I suggest Mr Bones from Paul Auster’s Timbuktu?  

It’s been ages since I read it but it’s pretty ambitious to do a whole novel from the perspective of a dog.  Mr Bones and his master (who is old and ailing) travel to Baltimore in a quest to find his master’s old English teacher.  The novel meditates upon death, the afterlife, and the state of America.'  

Mrs Cummings opted for classic children's fiction: The Famous Five, by Enid Blyton, featuring  'Timmy! The Best Dog in the World. Who else? And this is how I see him, not the awful new version. 

Alert, intelligent and ready for an adventure, Timmy is a crucial member of the gang. I absolutely adored the Famous Five books as a child, and reread them frequently. I suspect they have not held up well to changing social mores, so I have not risked returning to them as an adult. They have left me with a lifelong love of mystery stories.'

Talking of mysteries, what about Wellington, the poodle whose untimely demise (speared with a garden fork) is the catalyst for Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time? 

And - if we overlook the original 'dog in the night-time' himself - the stable dog whose failure to bark indicates that he knew the villain in the Sherlock Holmes adventure Silver Blaze - we can leap straight away to one of the notorious, mysterious dogs in all of literature: The Hound of the Baskervilles.  A dog that not only barks in the night-time, but howls, glows in the dark, and frightens a succession of hapless Baskerville heirs to their deaths …

Mrs Pemberton had absolutely no doubts about what her nomination would be: 'My favourite literary dog is Dogmatix from Asterix.  

His name is an excellent example of the play-on-words naming of the Asterix characters and he lives up to this in his debut in the stories where he follows Obelix to Gaul where he is finally adopted by Obelix. Dogmatix is a loyal and dogged companion and ally with an environmentalist side – known to howl fiercely if a tree is knocked down.'

And while we're on dogs in classical literature, here's Mr Preece-Smith's nomination: 'Odysseus' hunting dog, Argos. 

After 20 years apart, Argos, abandoned on a farm, instantly recognises his owner, even though he is heavily disguised. Argos dies just after the reunion, which is made even sadder by the fact Odysseus has to suppress his tears for fear of being recognised. Such enduring canine loyalty was quite possibly the inspiration for the climax of the Cambridge Latin Course Book 1, when Caecilius' dog, Cerberus, sticks by his doomed master during the destruction of Vesuvius.'

Mr Tofts nominated Bendico, the dog from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, loyal and loving companion of the ageing Prince. Bendico's journey from carefree pet to mouldering stuffed animal is (Lampedusa argued) the 'chiave' to the whole novel. 

Alain Delon as Prince Tancredi using Bendico as a pillow in Visconti's 1963 film adaptation of The Leopard 

Tossed from a window, Bendico's stuffed corpse in flight momentarily resembles the leopard that is the Salina family's crest, symbolising the aristocracy itself as it flames briefly one more time before falling into obsolescence.  

Mr Green, one of our resident experts on sci-fi and fantasy, contributed several suggestions. First of all, a classic dystopian creation - the Mechanical Hound from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. With green-blue neon eyes, and a sizzling metal growl, the Hound is an eight-legged, mechanical monster, programmed to seek out and destroy the dissidents who try to save rather than burn books. The Hound is technically a machine, but rebel fireman Montag suspects it of starting to develop its own feelings, and instincts, although his boss reassures him that it can't think anything it isn't programmed to think.  But - theoretically - nor could Montag, before he started to rebel …

Mr Green was a mine of suggestions (who knew there were so many dogs in sci-fi???), and also nominated The Starlight Barking, 'a genuinely disturbing 1960s Harlan Ellison post-apocalyptic, oft-overlooked psychic-pet alien-visitation nuclear-war official sequel to 101 Dalmatians - with a blurb like that, how can you resist? - plus Toby the robodog bodyguard in Alan Moore's The Ballad of Halo Jones, along with another weaponised creature, Rex, from the Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

This nomination was seconded by Mrs Cummings: 'Dogs of War is great! Rex is a terrifying human/canine bioform designed to be a killing machine. He also wants to be a Good Dog. A war atrocity makes him reevaluate what that means. Rex is also strangely cute!'

Beyond sci-fi, Mr Green suggested a memorable range of canines in horror fiction, from Stephen King's Cujo - a rabid Saint Bernard - to Rachel Yoder’s more recent Nightbitch. From more traditional literature, he singled out the novels of Jack London: 'London writes brilliantly about dogs in The Call of the Wild and lesser-known short stories like Brown Wolf and To Build a Fire.'  

His final suggestion came from humorist David Sedaris's collection of essays Me Talk Pretty One Day, one of which tackles the sad death of his pet dog, Mädchen: 'Her food was still in the bowl when our father brought home an identical German shepherd, which the same Cindy thoughtfully christened Mädchen II. This tag-team progression was disconcerting, especially to the new dog, which was expected to possess both the knowledge and the personality of her predecessor. “Mädchen One would never have wet the floor like that,” my father would scold, and the dog would sigh, knowing she was the canine equivalent of a rebound.'

Flying the flag for fantasy fiction, Dr McDonnell nominated the dire-wolf pups from George R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire: but do they count as dogs? Robert Baratheon didn't think so - and look where that got him. Pups Ghost, Summer, Nymeria et al serve a similar function as loyal friends and fierce guardians to the Stark children as other dogs in fiction, so we think they have a right to be included in our canine pantheon.  

Elsewhere in contemporary fantasy, there's also Toby the Wonder-Dog, from Ben Aaronovitch's brilliant Rivers of London series. 

Toby's nose for sniffing out ghosts and all manner of 'weird bollocks' makes him an invaluable companion to Peter Grant and the other residents of the Folly. Recent novels in the series have tended to park Toby in Molly's kitchen (no doubt because of the endless supply of tasty snacks), and Abigail's fabulous foxes have taken over as the series' animal companions. They have an advantage over Toby - they can talk.  And so can Timmy, from Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go. 

In Ness's bleak dystopia, where a virus means that men (and male dogs) can hear each other's thoughts all the time, driving each other to murderous insanity, Timmy starts off as comic relief, his unremarkable personality triggering the novel's opening words: 'The first thing you find out when your dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got much to say.' Timmy is as dim and dopey as Toby is sharp, but he's loyal, loving and even heroic in the end.

The brainiest dog in literature has to be Six Thirty from Bonnie Garmus's Lessons in Chemistry: true, he can't actually talk, but he can think, and -  thanks to the pedagogic brilliance of Elizabeth Zott, who brings to dog literacy the same rigour, determination and persistence as she does to cookery - this mangy, mongrel pup ends up with a vocabulary of over a thousand words, and a neat side-hustle in child-minding. Ignore the cute and cuddly labradoodle in the TV version - the original is much more … original.

Our final nomination for a great literary dog is Boatswain, the Newfoundland dog who belonged to the Romantic poet Lord Byron, and while real, found his way into Byron's poetry, and his neighbour's fiction. Long before he was famously 'mad, bad and dangerous to know', Byron was a lonely 14 year-old, stuck in a small, dull town in the middle of Nottinghamshire with no family and few friends other than girl-next-door Elizabeth Pigot - and Boatswain. 

We know how much Byron loved Boatswain because he built a massive tomb for him at Newstead Abbey, and inscribed it with a poem in praise of his 'best of friends'. But even more moving than the monument is a hand-made book that Pigot made for Byron as a present: 'The Wonderful History of Lord Byron and His Dog', complete with endearingly clunky hand-drawn illustrations. 

Byron and Boatswain, as sketched by Elizabeth Pigot

In the pictures, Boatswain frolics about engagingly, catching rats (and delivering them to Byron when he's in his bath), playing cricket, and - in a particularly bizarre dream sequence - dressing up as a 'preacher' and warning Byron to 'resist temptation' (to little effect, it turns out).  Byron surrounded himself with animals all his life, from the pet bear he kept while a student at Cambridge, to the wolfhound who was by his side during his final days fighting for Greek independence in Missolonghi. But Boatswain was always his most beloved pet, possessing 'beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man without his vices'.  

We hope you've enjoyed our round-up of literary dogs, and if you'd like to vote for which one you think is the GOAT, feel free to vote here: voting closes on Monday, and many thanks to everyone who contributed to today's post.  

*discussions with the fourth form reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun about the nature of what constitutes a 'person' - rationality? the ability to communicate? the ability to feel pain? self-awareness? - led to some heated debates about whether a dog is a person, and hence to dogs as literary personae ...