FICTION: EVE PATTENreviews The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn MonroeBy Andrew O'Hagan Faber, 279pp. £18.99
ONE OF THE many things I gleaned from an interlude on writers and their animals in Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel is that Maud Gonne travelled across Europe accompanied by a grey marmoset called Chaperone. Marmosets are well known for their nationalism, apparently, though not their resilience: poor Chaperone later expired from the cold when his mistress took him with her on an ill-advised trip to St Petersburg.
Unlikely yet true, and the kind of detail that confounds the reader’s attempt to tread this book’s very fine line between extraordinary real events and flights of authorial fantasy. Primates are a side issue, however, for this is really a tale about dogs, and one dog in particular: Maf, a Maltese terrier of exquisite pedigree, born in Scotland, raised in England, then transported to the US to become the companion and confidant of the greatest film star of the age, Marilyn Monroe.
Admittedly, this premise (again based in fact) sounds off-puttingly whimsical, the titular nod to Laurence Sterne presaging some kind of gratuitous picaresque on the pitfalls of celebrity culture. But get beyond this and The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroeturns out to be a superior take on that desperately seductive era the US in the early 1960s. Brilliantly constructed as a latter-day comedy of manners, the novel presents life from a canine perspective, which refreshes all the constituent elements of a period we thought we already knew – Kennedy, the Cold War, the Rat Pack, Martin Luther King, Monroe herself, flying saucers – and realigns them in a discerning portrait of a people, imported from elsewhere but now "becoming American, becoming modern, joining themselves in those years to a new view of space and sex and money and art".
As a story it grips simply because the delegating of the narrative voice to a dog allows O'Hagan a freedom with character and scene he never quite secured in his previous fiction. I think his subject sits more comfortably, too. Given its focus on Monroe, this book will draw comparisons with his 2003 novel Personality, but there he struggled for the right balance between a topical spin on the Scottish singing sensation Lena Zavaroni and the real meat of the tale, the incarceration of Italian citizens in Britain during the second World War. Monroe, by contrast, carries rather than just facilitates this novel's material. With echoes, perhaps, of her appearance in Nicholas Roeg's 1985 film Insignificance, O'Hagan uses her as a cipher for a time and a place; an emblem for a society trapped in the articulations and exchanges of Hollywood movie scripts, and no longer able to distinguish between screenplay and reality.
If that makes it sound blandly sententious, it isn’t. The book is crammed with savage blasts of wit, usually directed at the parade of stars and singers who feature in a sequence of pathetic or psychopathic turns. The cameos are terrific: a fast-fragmenting Natalie Wood; a belligerent Carson McCullers; Sammy Davis jnr “bojangling his way downstage”; Shelley Winters, described by some studio hanger-on as “the kind of woman who brings out the homosexual in all of us”; Sinatra, simultaneously suave and thuggish; JFK, arch and elusive.
With such a large cast of “real” characters there are some necessary excursions into backstory, but these are rarely a distraction, and O’Hagan manages to restrain those flights of quirky elaboration to which less disciplined writers, high on Wikipedia and the Biography Channel, might be given.
And the dog? Well, Maf (that's short for Mafia Honey, by the way) is a philosopher and a scholar, an artist and a thinker, so implausible in his wide-ranging intellect and wise aperçusthat plausibility recedes from the discussion, yet still canine enough to urinate maliciously on the back seat of Sinatra's car and sink his teeth into Lillian Hellman's ankle. Against the odds, his role as narrator is hugely successful. Maf's profundity is a foil for the shallowness of the society in which he lives. Precious, enigmatic, epigrammatic, he is a worthy successor to Virginia Woolf's Flush (duly referenced in the opening pages), a distinguished colleague of the numerous literary animal companions mentioned in passing and an engaging show-off in front of the various talking and thinking creatures – robins, squirrels, spiders, bedbugs, rats – who crop up sporadically in a surreal Disneyesque chorus.
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dogis an elegy for a lost age and its players, an affectionate mockery of a childish era. It plunders the strangeness of a modern US brashly reinventing itself in the frothy postwar decades. Through Monroe's sad presence it reveals a still-young nation poised for a fall, shoving its political demons under the linoleum, partying long into the night, then throwing itself by day onto the welcoming couch of some stern Mitteleuropean shrink. The fact that a dog can see all this but not judge it gives O'Hagan the edge over other writers trying to chronicle the same period. To put it plainly, his novel can't take itself too seriously, though its subject is serious enough: along with modernity and liberty comes anguish, a realisation that sometimes tips the comedy into deep melancholy.
I loved this novel – its brightness and learning, its vicious dialogue, its heady pace. O’Hagan has shifted up a gear (or several) in stylistic confidence and moved forward in a direction one wouldn’t perhaps have expected, given the relative sobriety of his back catalogue. But for me his adventure in faux picaresque pays off handsomely: this is a clever, knowing book, full of entertainments and insights, and a treat, of course, for dog lovers everywhere.
Eve Patten lectures in the school of English at Trinity College, Dublin. She is on the judging panel for the 2010 International Impac Dublin Literary Award
