The Dog

Dubai Doldrums

For Indians, Dubai is a land of glamour and mystery, where film stars and gangsters party at impossibly opulent locations.

For the unnamed narrator (identified only as X—his name is so awful he hates to use it) of Joseph O’Neill’s Man Booker long-listed The Dog, it is the  “abracadabropolis” of self-invention—as intriguing as it is terrifying.

X is New York lawyer, who has a cushy job, a rent-stabilised apartment and a girlfriend called Jenn, with whom he is in a long-term but not happy relationship.  Jenn is the kind who plans her life and when her desire to have a child at thirty-four is not fulfilled, their relationship cracks under the strain. After a monologue about good men vs bad men that Jenn unleashes on the hapless X—which would have been hilarious if it didn’t sound so sadly demented-- he just flees.

 It becomes unbearable for him to stay on in New York, so when an old classmate Eddie Batros offers him a job in Dubai, he grabs it.  The job as Family Officer for the crazy and idle rich Batros clan, requires him to do nothing except be “trustworthy” and sign random papers.

He gets to live in a swank apartment, drive a fancy car and spend on anything he pleases, including high priced call girls.  He even manages to get himself an all purpose factotum Ali, who is one of those fixers, whose status in Dubai as a “bidoon” or outsider is a grey area.  Annoyance comes in the form of Alain Batros, Eddie’s overweight teenage nephew, who is sent to Dubai to intern with X and lose weight. The boy is stupid and sullen, kept busy with Sudoku puzzles as X goes about his busy life doing nothing—composing mental mails to Eddie and his brother Sandros, or having pedicures at his friend Ollie’s swish salon.

Everything about the Dubai that X encounters is big, glittering and ambitious—massive towers being constructed all over the place. Expats live well, and treat their domestic help like slaves, but also accept that they have to live by the somewhat rules of the Emirates.

Swirling round expat circles is news of the disappearance of an adman and famous diver, Ted Wilson, who, it turns out, had a second family in Dubai.  His American wife comes looking for him; her meeting with X is strange and funny, ending with him throwing a jar of lentils at her.

A dreamy life like this has to unravel and it does it unexpected ways. O’Neill’s observations about Dubai and the culture clashes are astute. He writes carefully constructed, page-long sentences, that underline X’s tone of comic bafflement, and alarming discoveries.

Dubai will never again seem like the benign and glittering place where Bollywood is so fond of shooting its blockbusters.

The Dog

By Joseph O’Neill

Publisher: Pantheon

Pages: 241