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Dog Boy
by Eva Hornung

Release Date: 18th Jan 2010
Publisher: Bloomsbury
ISBN: 978 0 7475 9905 0
RRP: £16.99

Average Customer Rating: 
(0.0 based on 0 ratings)

A sobering and incisive observational story of a boy who becomes dog...

Fiction that closely resembles fact and indeed a novel inspired by both a real-life story of a feral boy found in Moscow and the myth of Romulus and Remus: Dog Boy concerns an anomaly, a quirk of nature, a series of unusual choices that result in a boy becoming more dog than human. A toddler is abandoned in a derelict apartment building. For days, he remains inside, shivering cold and slowly starving. When finally he ventures outside, he decides almost whimsically to follow a stray dog and so his journey from human to dog begins.

The likelihood of a four-year-old being capable of making the decisions Romochka makes is somewhat ambiguous, as is the likelihood that a suckling bitch with newborn pups to feed would take kindly to a strange non-dog pawing at her for milk. However, this is where the author’s imagination takes flight and leads us to places we would not normally go: the notion of a young boy digging into the warm innards of a recently dead animal to extract its heart and lungs is terrifying, repulsive and distasteful. That the same boy licks dogs’ fur, faces and mouth - even if covered in excrement or viscera – is disconcerting to even the most ardent of dog-lovers.

The introduction of Dmitry and Natalya (doctors at a special centre) somehow detracts from the beautiful simplicity of the story of Romochka. Their oddly drawn relationship, both professional and personal, is an unnecessary departure and doesn’t flow in the same way that Hornung observes the dogs’ relationships. The rhetorical debate surrounding the psychology of sensory and stimulation deprived childhood is an interesting sideline, but smothers and stultifies the ethereal fragility achieved in recounting Romochka’s daily and seasonal struggles.

Dog Boy is a tender look at the affections, familial support and behaviourisms of feral dogs and their unexpected acceptance of a young human boy. Its stark realism and embracing of all things natural, no matter how objectionable or abhorrent they may be to our civilised sensibilities, make this compulsive reading. A slightly disappointing ending does diminish the overall power of the book, but still, this is one worth reading.

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