A DOG'S LIFE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 438, 14 November 1947, Page 21

A DOG'S LIFE

ORART. By

Ormond Bugton. .

H.

Tombs Ltd.

‘ A LARGE but noble-looking mongrel, "Bart" so far ensnared his master’s affections as to become the subject many years later of a devoted biography. Dog _habits and dog manners are skilfully portrayed in this study of a lovéd companion to which Russell Clark's drawings add a pleasant embellishment. It has all the deep affection of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick’s Jock of the Bushveld (which -.has never, I think, been unseated from the position of the dog classic, even by Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a book which is, after all, vastly more than the study of a flop-eared spaniel). But Bart did not have the run of the wilds of Africa, and his master disapproved of blood sports, even for dogs. The most satisfactory books about animals are those, I feel, which are written from an explicitly human point of view (books like J. H. Driberg’s Engato the Lioncub), even though this has the disadvafitage, in the hands of the weaker brethreh, of all sorts of arch‘ness and falseness creeping in. Bart is as free from sentimentality as it is possible for such a book to be. Moreover, there is enough matter-of-fact narration of "the circumstances of ordinary life in New Zealand to keep any exuberance of ill-judged fantasy at arm’s length. —

You do not, when you read this book, hear a posturing chorus on the sidelines exclaiming "Oh, isn’t he sweet?" The author tells with humour a plain story ot plain people living a slow-moving domestic life in country and town, with a plain dog and his adventures in the foreground. Those who own dogs will recognise the truth of the portrait; those who don’t can learn from it. This book appeared in England in 1944: this is its first New Zealand publication.

David

Hall