Dog!
Mike Robbins
Author Bio
Mike Robbins is the author of two books of travel memoirs, a novel, and a scientific book on climate change. He has been a journalist, traveler, development worker and climate-change researcher.
Born in England in 1957, he graduated in 1979 and worked in rock-music publishing, financial journalism, as a traffic broadcaster and as a reporter on the fishing industry.
In 1987 he went to work as a volunteer in Sudan, an experience he described in his book Even the Dead are Coming (2009). He later also worked as a volunteer in Bhutan and went on to live in Aleppo, Brussels and Rome. These travels led eventually to a collection of long travel pieces, The Nine Horizons (2014), and a novel, The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán (2014). A collection of three novellas, Three Seasons: Three Stories of England in the Eighties, was published at the end of 2014. He expects to complete another novel in 2016. Another non-fiction book is also in the works, a collection of pieces drawn in part from his blog (www.mikerobbinsNYC.blogspot.com).
Robbins is also the author of a scholarly work on agriculture and climate change, Cropping Carbon: Paying Farmers to Combat Climate Change (2011), published by Earthscan (now part of the Taylor & Francis group). He currently works as an editor in New York.
Description
In the summer of 1975 a Welsh hypnotist, Arnall Bloxham, startled everyone in Britain in a TV programme in which he regressed three subjects to their past lives. One had served on a ship of the line in the Napoleonic Wars; another remembered being a hunter-gatherer in the prehistoric Balkans; and another recounted fleeing from a pogrom in medieval York. The programme, The Bloxham Tapes, has never quite been forgotten in Britain, but few people can remember watching it now and it probably no longer exists.
But writer Mike Robbins, 18 at the time, never quite forgot it. What happened after death? If you were reborn, would it be as a human again, and if not, why not? Forty years later, stuck on a book that was going too slowly, he broke off to write the novella Dog!, the story of an elderly rescue dog who is not quite what he seems. “I wanted to explore the possibilities,” he said. “I mean, what if that pug you saw in the park this afternoon was actually Henry VIII?”
Dog! isn’t religious or philosophical (and its author, too, is neither). “It’s the dramatic possibilities that I wanted to explore,” says Robbins. “I also wanted to have a bit of fun with the subject. I’d been working for years on a novel set in postwar England, and the research had been killing me.” He came up with a cheerful slob called Bazza (the English often abbreviate names into Baz, Caz, etc.), a university lecturer in a provincial English city. Bazza adopts an old dog, but finds it unaffectionate and uncommunicative. Still, the two of them live together cheerfully enough, despite the dog’s contempt for humans and its habit of licking itself when guests come round. Then a Himalayan monk comes to stay for a few weeks while teaching courses in the city. He senses at once that there is something strange about the dog. He is right.
But perhaps that’s all that should be given away. Except that, as the book’s blurb says: “Dog is a powerful story of love and loss, sin, redemption and dog mess. You’ll never see your pet the same way again.”
Book excerpt
The monk descended from the front most carriage. He was tall and muscular and his face was dominated by his high cheekbones; his head was shaved and he wore reddish-orange robes and, oddly somehow, trainers.
“He looks as if he could beat someone to a pulp,” said Bazza.
“That wouldn’t be very karmic, Bazza,” said Caz.
The monk approached, set down his modest case and bowed.
“Tshering,” he said in a voice that seemed too high for his large body.
“Barry,” said Bazza, “but Bazza will do. This is Caroline but everyone calls her Caz.”
“Indeed,” said the monk. He inclined his head a little. “Tshering is, in fact, my only name. But I am called Tshering Thinley for passport purposes. It seems one cannot cross borders with just one name; though I have never felt I needed more.”
He looked down at the dog.
“And this is the dog,” explained Caz.
Tshering made as if to pat him, then hesitated. He looked into the dog’s eyes. The dog looked back. They stared at each other for several seconds. The dog put his head slightly on one side. Tshering did the same. He frowned. He muttered something.
“I’m sorry?” said Caz.
“I beg your pardon, I spoke in Dzongkha,” said Tshering.
“You’re all right with dogs?” said Bazza anxiously.
“Oh yes,” said Tshering. “My father was a yak-herder. We had many dogs to protect the yak. Bears and boar are a problem, you see, especially in winter pasture.”
“Oh,” said Bazza. “They must be big dogs if they fight bears.”
“They are very big dogs,” said Tshering, smiling. Then his face grew serious again as he looked at the dog. Now he did bend down and pat the animal gently on the neck.
“Sometimes,” said Caz, “we think he is an old soul.”
Tshering chuckled. He seemed to relax as they left the station. “We do not think in such a way,” he said. “To be sure, when one passes, one’s spirituality may enter another realm, but not one’s spirit; there is no individual – one is – what did your Milton say? – each one a part of the main.”
“You have read Milton?” asked Caz.
“You are surprised?” said Tshering. He smiled. “But you know, when we were in winter pasture, my parents would send me to an aunt in a village below, where I could go to school; and I had an Indian teacher, from Cochin, who read it to us. He wanted us to understand that Buddhism was more complicated than we thought. Until then, all I knew of religion was the terrifying deities on the temple walls, and the phallic paintings on the houses in the valleys.”
He thought for a moment, then intoned:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
Author Website
http://www.mikerobbinsnyc.blogspot.com/