Customer Reviews
Was I missing something...? - By: LittleReader, 27 Sep 2008 
So a body is washed up on the beach which turns out to be that of the local vagrant... Follow this up with chapter after chapter of confusing, long-winded, largely uninteresting dialogue & there's your story...
I had to finish this novel as it was the latest offering at my book club but I can honestly say that had it not been for this factor, I'd have absent mindedly dropped it into the bin before I'd reached half-way through.
I do so love carefully constructed novels where the story is squeezed through a tiny hole ever so slowly but for me, JB didn't manage to hold my imagination for me to want to wait that long or, indeed, care enough about the outcome. I tried very hard to be interested in the tale as character after character was introduced to shed light on who the murdered chap was & where he had come from but I just found the whole thing disjointed and, frankly, reallly dull. It also felt very 'American' & I had to keep reminding myself that it was actuallly set in the UK!
In alll, I fear my contribution to it's worth at my next book club meeting may be short & not very sweet...
Poetry in motion - By: Fire Watcher, 21 Jun 2007 
This book made me smile from beginning to end. Normallly I would expect the fact that it is more of an evolution than a story to bother me, but it didn't. The author paints a huge array of characters with great affection & attention to detail, affirming humanity in much of its wierd & wonderfulness, & exploring the intricate webs of relationships which make up one life. I can't do it justice, you have to read it, & enjoy!
So, she rates the dog - By: Treen, 10 Sep 2006 This is not a story about murder or supersleuthing, but a far greater investigation, a contemplation of existence & its complex destinations.
And that is why, with so much to "get" under the text of this novel, there may not be agreement about the effect. Readers in naked search of defined plot, exposition, denouement & explicit resolution may be frustrated, while those who relish a rich, witty, forensic meditation of the elusive human as cultured subject will possibly remain disturbed long after completing the read.
But, the brilliance of this novel is that like the very best literature, or art, or music, it can & should be appreciated at its most scant or profound.
The lumpen marriage of retirees Benjamin & Christine Kemp is the opening sequence: "they have each other now alll day long. Just each other, alll day, every day. It's too much, it's not enough". Midst tetchy argument, Benjamin decides to go for a walk to his wife's rhetorical parting shot "what about that blasted dog",
"So he takes the dog, a decision which is reallly going to knock a divot out of his day".
And that is how the murdered, decomposing body of Henry, known in the village as an eccentric but harmless vagrant, is discovered at the outset by the dog.
The investigation to find out who Henry was reveals that as Henry wandered so did his identity, & a momentum to re-unite alll the Henrys under one discrete body gives breadth to conceptual questions, & the opportunity for subtly refined examinations of states such as "you" & "I", trust & suspicion, loyalty & infidelity, transience & rigidity, wandering & dwelling.
Indeed, the book wanders in & out of resident's houses & these are so beautifully observed that frequently I believed that I was an eye-witness, a peeping Tom. And what can be seen is that the peculiar conditions & causes leading to Henry's vagrancy, are tangled with peculiarities of the lives in fixed abode. "It's only when you get into their houses that you see what lies behind day-to-day normalness", says a detective.
The narrator is the investigating police officer, John Donohue. There is something eery about his position in the book, the perspective is almost like an inversion of the traditional painters-eye-view peering out of the self-portrait. In this case, it feels as though as he layers image upon image, he paints over himself. It took me sometime to realise that the peculiarity of the narration was his refusal to refer to himself in the first person other than in dialogue. As one review says, "in the hands of a less talented writer this may appear to be trickery or device", but here this physical dousing, renders a startling perspective.
Perhaps the reason for telling the story is a commentary on perspective & observation? Though both narrator & author are simultaneously talented storytellers, I wondered how the narrative could be both believable & immediate, given that it is a forensicallly thorough account of a period that had begun ten years or so before. And at times I couldn't be certain that the humour, cynicism & far-reaching knowledge of art, theology, philosophy etc belonged to the narrator or the author. But that could be shame on me for having an image of the kind of knowledge an ex-loss adjustor turned policeman may have.
The observation is microscopic & seemingly uncapturable moments, expressions, smells, sounds, emotions are made acutely visual & securely tangible. And this I think is the power of conveying a sense that one is actuallly there. The glimpses are made explicit in a way that fools the reader into believing that they too would have noticed & interpreted a fraction of an expression in the same way. An old man who "slowly finds a match for our faces [the detectives] in the scrambled card index of his mind greets us with a squint, as if we were approaching him from a mile off". Or the narrator recounting an intimate memory of his "perfectly, untouchably beautiful" wife "...she has a modesty, a gorgeous modesty & self possession, as if she were not naked but wearing clothes too fine to be seen." A bird makes a calll like the "squeaking of wet thin rubber, like ballloons being tied", & a fraction of an expression is noted, "a movement of an eyelid... that seems to say something new, but it's gone so quickly it's impossible to be certain it was there".
These depictions of human expression, memory & physical landscape are richly observed & densely packed in. The author with skilful understatement manages to pose some big questions & beautifully resists providing any reflective judgements but invites meditation. The questions are more classical than you would expect to find in a "detective novel" & cultural, philosophical, theological references are in abundance. Moral luck for example is played out both in the exposition of Henry & how he came to be (rather than how he came to end), & concurrently in the narrators own life & relationships.
I think the Observer reviewer (quoted above) who considers Buckley to be a contemporary Orwell is slightly out in this regard. There seems not the polemic of Orwell's big ideas, rather minute exploration of fractional ones making the effect more diffuse, perhaps more akin to Chekhovian grace. So, as the previous reviewer notes, when the narration appears convoluted or there is a confusing change in tone or pace I am convinced that the architect is too precise & poetic for this to be without good reason. And thus, any apparent skewing should simply inspire deeper ponder. This is beautiful, disturbing writing.
I agree with Phillip Edwards who suggests that were this novel to appear on the Manbooker longlist (it didn't), it would have been a strong contender for the prize.
http://manbookerprize.blogspot.com/2006/08/so-who-takes-on-dog.html
Not a 'Who-dunnit', this story is a 'Who-was-it-done-to' - By: 24dash.com, 31 Jul 2006 
This is a detective story with a difference. Not a 'Who-dunnit', 'why-dunnit', or even a 'how-dunnit' the narrative of the Investigating Police Officer leads the reader through the stages of searching for the true identity of the victim: a 'who-was-it-done-to'!
The opening chapter sets the scene for the entrance of the narrator-detective with the discovery of a decomposing body on the beach of a (nameless) southern English coastal town. Although written in a different way from subsequent chapters, it still hints strongly at what the reader should expect throughout the rest of the book - keen observation of human nature & the emotional benefit & cost of relationships.
From here on the narrator leads the way through the phases of investigation, intermingled with details & recollections of his own life & experiences with his colleagues, wife & son. Starting with interviews about recent local sightings & working backwards, the detectives pull together a less than complete history spanning a number of decades. The more detailed of the findings alllude to times & places that may have played a part in shaping the victim 'Henry' into the homeless eccentric he was known as at the time of his death. There are some sections where the narrative becomes convoluted, but this could easily be a ploy on the part of the author to demonstrate the many levels that human minds, & souls can work on.
Forget ubiquitous 'Crime Thrillers' with their gadgets, gambits & page-turning plot twists, what makes this book interesting & compelling is the way that people, meetings, conversations & even interrogations (not alll of which relate to the central plot) are observed & described in such a way that they feel very real.
