Louis de Bernieres: Red Dog

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

I assume that Louis de Bernieres intended this little book for children, but it's strangely hard to tell.

For those who know de Bernieres' Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Red Dog will come as something of a surprise.

But what unites it to the remainder of his oeuvre is de Bernieres' talent for listening to the songs of a place and playing them back, with the occasional note-perfect, jazzy flourish of his own.

He is self-conscious about this as the task of a novelist: his South American novels feature a character who is an ethnomusicologist, and it is clear that de Bernieres sees himself, like Captain Corelli, as a troubador.

Red Dog is a music he learned while travelling for a literary festival in, of all unlikely places, Karratha, a mining town in Western Australia. In the Martian landscape outside the town of Dampier, he found a bronze statue commemorating Red Dog, the dog of the north-west, and he knew right away that here was a story.

He went collecting, and here retells, with his unerring sense of the aesthetic, the beautiful, true story of the Red Cloud kelpie which became a celebrity in the north-west of Australia in the 70s.

It seems that Red Dog never really considered himself to be tied to any particular place or person, unless it was to John, a worker from the Hamersley Iron Transport section. When John is killed in a motorbike accident, Red Dog sets out on a quest to find him, a quest which takes him right around the vast north-western corner of the Sunburned Country.

Making friends wherever he goes, but bonding to no one, Red Dog becomes, as one of those friends puts it, "in common".

The beauty of this book is that it speaks in an Aussie drawl. At times, de Bernieres seems too eager to flaunt the slang which, magpie-like, he has acquired. But he does provide a glossary at the back, so that readers unfamiliar with "eskies", "Dags", "roos", "Bundy" and getting "Blotto on Rotto" are at no disadvantage.

In the end, this is a book for anyone, young or old, who ever had a cherished pet. Red Dog, a free spirit and dog of the north-west, looks set to become a hairy citizen of the world.

Random House

$34.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.