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Red Dog, Red Dog (2008)

by Patrick Lane(Favorite Author)

3.07 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0771046359 (ISBN13: 9780771046353)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

McClelland & Stewart

review 1: I enjoyed this book. Lane tells the difficult story of the Stark family who are living in extreme poverty in the Canadian desert in the 1950s. He shows how experiences of abuse, neglect, poverty, addiction, and emotional instability shaped the lives and experiences of Tom and Eddy Stark, how their parents decisions, behaviour, and actions and the social context determined the fate of the brothers and how the early lives of their parents determined those decisions, behaviours, and actions. He expresses a continual cycle of hardship and tragedy, but he never takes it too far. His style of prose can be a bit trying at times and overly complicated in descriptions, but the back and forth movement from the early lives of the parents, to the early lives of the brothers, to the pr... moreesent is well done and gives the sense that every event described will contribute towards a realization or ultimate understanding by the end of the novel.
review 2: "It was stone country where a bone cage could last a thousand years under the moon, its ribs a perch for Vesper sparrows, its skull a home for Harvest mice." (p. 14)In a strange - but fitting - genre cross of Western Noir and Southern Gothic, Patrick Lane has crafted a generational story of horror, tragedy, and family resilience in the face of the unbearable. The Stark family, living in the house on Ranch Road in a rural farming town in 1950s British Columbia, hides terrible secrets. These secrets unfold throughout the book as two brothers, Eddy and Tom Stark, get caught up in events that quickly spiral out of control. Told partly through the narration of Tom and Eddy's dead infant sister, and partly through Tom and Eddy, the history of the Stark family shows how sorrow can be inherited and how we are shaped by the history we bear. The ghostly infant narrator is wise and omniscient beyond her hours, and she is the true tragedy of the story. She once said about her aunt, "That was her, Father's sister, girl and woman, eggless in the Eden she made of herself, a single name writ large on her living skin. She sat in the kitchen late one night and told her brother that the day she finally left the family farm she swore to herself she'd never marry, never carry a child. She said: I bear his name and that is curse enough. What? And bear another Stark into the world? That name ends with me." (p. 315)Lane is truly a poet at heart, and that comes through clearly in his lyrical prose and mellifluous phrases, and he proves that a beautiful sorrow is just that much harder to bear. less

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