Everyone’s Pal

John Sutherland

• Red Dog by Louis de Bernières
  Secker, 119 pp, £10.00, October 2001, ISBN 0 436 25617 7
• Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World by Louis de Bernières
  Vintage, 119 pp, £6.99, October 2001, ISBN 0 09 942844 X

Who would have expected Louis de Bernières to follow up Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with the soft-centred biography of a lovable pooch? Red Dog could be seen as a reversion to national type – the English, Nabokov witheringly remarked, feel sorry for the blind man’s dog. And where there are soft spots, to coin a book-trade proverb, there’s hard cash. The author’s prologue records that Red Dog is a ‘found tale’. In 1998, on a trip to a literary festival in Perth, Western Australia, ‘part of the arrangement was that I should go to Karratha to do their first ever literary dinner.’ Having spread his civilising influence de Bernières then ‘went exploring and discovered the bronze statue to Red Dog outside the town of Dampier’. Hardly Voss. He found the unexpected monument intriguing, however, and shortly afterwards returned to Western Australia ‘and spent two glorious weeks driving around collecting Red Dog stories’.