The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski

Pablo Picasso, Boy with Dog

(November 20) This is such an awesome book.

I pictured myself blogging “This is such an awesome book” before I was even halfway through it, but I thought I would be writing it for much different reasons -- like, totally different.

The first half of the book is this lovely bucolic story about a sensitive boy who grows up in a dog-breeding family -- dog-breeding itself being really interesting as a science and an art -- and though the boy has a small handicap, his life is really wonderful and wondrous, and all of this is told by a very accomplished and gentle narrator. You sense that something dreadful is going to happen to test the boy and the dogs, but you hope there will be a minimum of suffering (for both people and dogs).

But then, suddenly, shockingly, this book morphs into something else entirely -- a hoary old horror story that’s haunted English literature for the last 500 years (and I think never so chillingly as in this incarnation), and it’s not only shocking that The Story of Edgar Sawtelle has the nerve to do this but it’s dumbfounding that it turns out to have been set up so well -- everything fits perfectly through the morph; the whole first half of the book brilliantly lulls you into thinking it’s quite a different tale, but then you can’t deny it was that dark, depressing tragedy all along. In other words, it’s not an Ian McEwen-style, artistic-licence “surprise!”

I can remember the moment I realized it was Shakespeare -- it actually made my hair stand on end, gave me a psychological jolt. I had been thinking, Heh, an uncle moves in on his brother’s widow, just like Hamlet -- of all the things to make me think of Hamlet!--; and, heh, the uncle’s name is Claude -- and then -- omigod the mother’s name is Trudy -- !

And then all the characters step into place -- Polonius, Ophelia, Fortinbras, Laertes, the witches... everybody (OK, the witches are from Macbeth). It’s like a black-light performance when all the suited stunt-people emerge from the backdrop and you realize the plate was really carried, not thrown, across the stage ... only this time the suited stunt-people are those ghoulish murdering Danes and their psychopath prince, our old friends. Sigh.

Even though it’s modern people and dogs filling the roles, Wroblewski captures all of Hamlet’s most enthralling issues really well and often exquisitely -- was King Hamlet really murdered, or is Hamlet insane? Was Gertrude complicit? Did Hamlet kill Polonius deliberately or by accident? In fact, his reinvention of some characters gave me new insights into the old play, particularly into the character of Laertes. And the dog versions of some of the characters offer some sweet interpretations.

However, having become so attached to the characters as they are in the first half of the book, and knowing how Hamlet ends, I had to read the last half of the book out of the corner of my eye, desperately clinging to the hope that Wroblewski would revert back to the pastoral tale eventually, or at least depart creatively from Hamlet. A writer could and might do that, right?

So, overall, quite the emotional rollercoaster ride of a book, and thrilling in a way no story about growing up in farm country should ever be.

(That other book, about the sensitive boy who learns or teaches a life lesson through his dogs and his muteness, would also have been good.)