This week I finally finished reading a book that I picked up several weeks ago in the Gatwick airport, Rory Stewart's The Places In Between. I had extra pounds that I didn't want to bother changing back into dollars, so a book seemed a reasonable purchase (and provided a good balance for the cookies and chocolate I bought with the rest of my funds). The specific book seemed a good choice because it was about a Scottish journalist walking across Afghanistan in 2002, just after the U.S. invasion. I had just been walking, so reading about walking seemed appropriate. And I want to learn about Afghanistan--it seems essential.
The book made me think about many things--about the value of walking, of seeing "the places in between"; about how unfortunate (and maddening) it is that a man could take this journey, but a woman certainly couldn't; about Afghanistan's ancient history and its present. I liked that Stewart told his story objectively, that he resisted commentary about the people and places he encountered.
At some point in the journey, Stewart acquired a dog--Babur, who he named after a Mogul emperor whose steps he was following. The dog was a nice addition to the story (after all, everyone needs a traveling companion), but at some point the book became about the dog. And this made me grumpy. I like dogs well enough, but I bought a book about Afghanistan, not about Babur the dog. This man walked miles and months across a war-ravaged country, seeing things that very few Westerners will ever see (much less read about) and he ends the book with an elegy for his dog: "I don't imagine Babur would have been very impressed to see my crying now, trying to bring back five weeks walking alone together, with my hand on a grizzled golden head, which is Babur, beside me and alive."
It's not that I think a writer should have to tell me the story I want to hear, or that he has no right to tell his story. Maybe for him the story was about Babur the dog (before walking through Afghanistan, he had walked through Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal--so maybe walking had lost some of its fascination). At the very least, though, somewhere in the blurb and the various exclamations of praise on the book's cover someone should have said, "This is a book about a dog."
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Or, "A dog will figure prominently in this book's denouement!"
Or, "The writer uses a dog as a narrative device, upon which to displace his [insert emotion here]!"
Or, "Warning: Symbolic Dog!"
If only the dog were a symbol, but I'm not sure he was. I tried to think about the dog's role as a narrative advice, but I got nothing. So if the dog figures in to the larger narrative about Afghanistan, I am too obtuse to get it.
My favorite book about Afghanistan (well, okay, the only book I've ever read about Afghanistan, but definitely well-written and compelling) is Tamim Ansary's "West of Kabul, East of New York," about growing up bicultural (Afghan dad, American mom) in several very different places in Afghanistan before moving to Colorado as a teenager and then traveling around trying to figure out his identity. I was lucky enough to hear him speak about the impossibility of translating Persian poetry (at a foreign language teachers' conference). I don't remember any dogs in the story.
A slightly-related fun book: "Round Ireland with a Fridge" by Tony Hawks. The title pretty much says it all, although he does more hitch-hiking than regular hiking. Also very few canines.
This brings up an interesting point about covers and titles and blurbs. How much to give away? But you would think that somewhere on the book it would say something about dogs.
I love to judge books by their covers. (And, I must say, that though I loved dog books as a child, I tend to shy away from them now. Except The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is not really about a dog.)
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