Hachette, Australia, 2006, 289pp.
Think the Hound of the Baskervilles meets Casper the Friendly Ghost. That’s the eponymous hero of this book, a Labrador pup so precocious that he manages to make a complete laughing stock of the instructor at his obedience school. He is subsequently expelled.
His owners, John and Jenny, are a young couple with fond memories of childhood pets. Having killed a special house plant, Jenny is now having serious doubts about her future parenting ability. They decide to take the interim step of adopting a puppy. What they fail to factor in is that, unlike babies, puppies come fully mobile. What follows is total mayhem as their house, and their lives are tipped upside down. Marley’s catalogue of chaos includes shredding couches, eating mattresses, disemboweling cushions and pillows, chewing rugs and gouging walls and floors. What he doesn’t destroy, he coats liberally with an unlimited supply of airborne drool and fur. He swallows household objects, anything from used Kleenex and dental floss to pay cheques and then some. In a thunderstorm he becomes really destructive. Even a strong steel cage is unable to hold him.
Not surprisingly, his relationship with his owners becomes strained, almost to breaking point, but his unquestioning loyalty and devotion wins through. At times of crisis he can show surprising courage and empathy. He is always gentle with and protective of the children.
As Marley bounds and crashes through the pages of this book with his own special brand of joie de vivre, I found myself alternately guffawing and cringing at his antics. The ending is almost unbearably poignant, and is certain to strike a chord in anyone who has ever had a close tie with an animal. We are reminded of how much we learn from, and are shaped by the unconditional love of our pets, in spite of their sometimes infuriating behaviour. In the words of the author: “Marley was a funny, bigger-than-life pain in the ass who never quite got the hang of the whole chain-of-command thing. Honestly, he might well have been the world’s worst-behaved dog. Yet he intuitively grasped from the start what it meant to be man’s best friend.” (277)
Lynne Roberts © 2007
