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Grassdogs by Mark O’Flynn

by
October 2006, no. 285

Grassdogs by Mark O’Flynn

Fourth Estate, $27.95 pb, 261 pp

Grassdogs by Mark O’Flynn

by
October 2006, no. 285

Grassdogs’ literary antecedents jostle like faces crowding around a porthole on a departing emigrant ship. One can tick them off like books on a required reading list for a twentieth-century Australian literature course. The doppelganger Jekyll-and-Hyde protagonists (blithe young city lawyer Tony Tindale and his bestial, increasingly wretched uncle Edgar) might have been written with actor Dan Wyllie in mind. Edgar even loses teeth in a car accident, just like Wyllie.

Part murder mystery (as reminiscent of the taking of the Beaumont children as it is of Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net [2000]) and part social-realist tragedy à la the film Tom White (2004), Grassdogs evades easy categorisation. The novel, though set in the present, begins and ends in a part of the country that time has neglected but not entirely passed over. Edgar, too, suffers from benign neglect. He gets more loyalty and companionship – more understanding, even – from the family pet terrier and various stray dogs than he does from his parents and the wary townsfolk.

Chris Boyd reviews 'Grassdogs' by Mark O’Flynn

Grassdogs

by Mark O’Flynn

Fourth Estate, $27.95 pb, 261 pp

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