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TITLE: The Dogs of Babel
AUTHOR: Carolyn Parkhurst
GENRE: Fiction, Literary
PUBLISHED: June 1, 2003
RATING: ★★★★ 1/2
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Description: Paul Iverson's life changes in an instant. He returns home one day to find that his wife, Lexy, has died under strange circumstances. The only witness was their dog, Lorelei, whose anguished barking brought help to the scene - but too late. In the days and weeks that follow, Paul begins to notice strange "clues" in their home: books rearranged on their shelves, a mysterious phone call, and other suggestions that nothing about Lexy's last afternoon was quite what it seemed. Reeling from grief, Paul is determined to decipher this evidence and unlock the mystery of her death. But he can't do it alone; he needs Lorelei's help. A linguist by training, Paul embarks on an impossible endeavor: a series of experiments designed to teach Lorelei to communicate what she knows. Perhaps behind her wise and earnest eyes lies the key to what really happened to the woman he loved. As Paul's investigation leads him in unexpected and even perilous directions, he revisits the pivotal moments of his life with Lexy, the brilliant, enigmatic woman whose sparkling passion for life and dark, troubled past he embraced equally.
Review: I selected this novel from my reading pile with no particular expectations other than its description sounded interesting. It seemed at first blush like a decent novel to fill my time, but, and to my surprise, I immediately found its story compelling and with many surprises. (The most startling is Lorelei's true origin.) Moreover, the writing is quite detailed, poetic, and beautiful.
I also thought The Dogs of Babel might be like another novel I dearly love, The Art of Racing in the Rain in which the dog, Enzo, is nearly omniscient and given anthropomorphic qualities. But no, The Dogs of Babel is nothing like that book; in fact, The Dogs of Babel isn't even really a "dog" story - although Lorelei, the Rhodesian Ridgeback, is ever-present during the story, she acts entirely like a dog, and there is no mystery to her existence - as Paul finds out by the end of the book. Finally, I expected The Dogs of Babel to be a simple easy-to-read story for women primarily, but it was more than that; all of my expectations I had as I began reading were quickly dashed: The Dogs of Babel is instead an in-depth look at a man's experience of losing his wife. And very, very good.
The protagonist, Paul, is reserved and straightforward but his wife, Lexy, whom we meet only in flashbacks, is spontaneous and quirky, and seemingly manic-depressive (although this possibility is never directly stated). She is a mystery from the beginning, changeable, quicksilver, and exciting for a man like Paul. Even during Lexy's darker moments when he feels he doesn't know his wife at all...
"And sitting here now, with all of Lexy's dreams in my lap, I realize there are things about her I will never know. It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all."
We get to know Lexy through a series of flashbacks, yet right from the beginning, we know that Paul returns home one day to find she is dead from a fall from an apple tree. Due to the injuries suffered, the death is ruled an accident, but Paul is tormented - WHY was she in the tree? She had never been known to climb a tree before, especially one so precariously high, so why had she done it now? But the alternative, suicide, seems horribly unthinkable to him as well. Paul spends many months neglecting his health, neglecting his work, stunned by his grief...
"I have heard that sometimes when a person has an operation to transplant someone else's heart or liver or kidney into his body, his tastes in foods change, or his favorite colors, as if the organ has brought with it some memory of its life before, as if it holds within it a whole past that must find a place within its new host. This is the way I carry Lexy inside me. Since the moment she took up residency within me, she has lent her own color to the way I see and hear and taste, so that by now I can barely distinguish between the world as it seemed before and the way it seems now. I cannot say what air tasted like before I knew her or how the city smelled as I walked its streets at night. I have only one tongue in my head and one pair of eyes, and I stopped being able to trust them a long time ago."
With no answers at hand, and certainly no easy answers, Paul decides he needs to consult with the only witness to the murder, their dog Lorelei; but to do that he needs to find a way to communicate with her. This leads to a rather harrowing sub-plot of communicating with an incarcerated lunatic who had experimented on communicating with dogs (it appeared successfully). The plot is a carefully woven narrative that results in a somewhat shocking conclusion - but when we look back through the book, we see the clues were there all along, but like Paul, we just couldn't see them...
"The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together."
The Dogs of Babel is really worth the the time to read. Everyone would like this book. As for me, I look forward to reading further novels by this author. 4.5 stars.
