Dog Binary

by Alex MacDonald

In a council flat beneath the flight-path to Heathrow, Emmanuel/Manny Marbas, fallen portrait artist and frustrated film-industry painter, is living with Jabba, an obese hedonist awaiting alien intervention. He’s becoming fixated by letters arriving for a previous tenant which detail the increasingly bizarre plight of Elijah, a pensioner suffering from dementia. Manny is hiding from his past: the father that deserted him, the mother that never was, the Russian oligarch’s daughter he loves too much and his own shameful abuse of the homosexual Bishop of W.; his physical mistreatment and vile misrepresentation in oils. Manny is on the slide, looking for distraction amongst cockeyed bungled robbery, drink, drugs and prostitutes. He travels north with a gun and a silencer to rectify things as best he can for Elijah. Manny’s extreme act of salvation is witnessed by Vernon Prendergast, a sinister, murdering narcoleptic hospital technician who holds the key to Manny’s past but might also be the death of him.

Put Charles Dickens, Chuck Palahniuk and Ignatius Reilly into a blender.
Press the button. Try not to get your clothes dirty…

Paperback

First published May 1, 2011

Reviews

[AriBa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just because you set your book in London, doesn't mean you should put a fucking swear in every other fucking word of your cunting sentences for authenticity when characters talk or think. While this book didn't do it too often, when it did it was done so obviously that it got annoying and broke the natural flow of sentences. It's not edgy or realistic. We don't all talk like Guy Ritchie gangsters, nor do we all talk like the Queen or Oliver Twist pickpocketers.

With that out of the way, this is the kind of book that needs to be made into a film, not because it's good but because it's just weird and the story is hard to keep track of. There's a lot of stuff going on and it just goes off on loads of tangents to describe a character or a past history, so by the time the individual parts converge into the final conclusion it just doesn't matter anymore. There were a few moments where I chuckled, "a few" being the key phrase here. I think I got bored of it halfway through. I didn't really care about any of the characters, to the point where chapters (that I'm pretty sure were about 2 or more different characters) were blending together. By the end I wasn't really paying any attention to the story anymore but instead going through the motions of reading words so that I'd get to the last page.

Note that I don't even introduce the basic premise of the story. I don't really know what the basic premise was. That's how much I cared.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

Apparently I'm the first Goodreader to read this, lucky me!

If you want to read something like a bad Palahniuk then it makes more sense just to read anything Chuck's written in the last five or six years as it'll be much more likely to come up in conversation and you'll get some value out of the time spent that way. Ugh.

It gets two stars because I have read both "The Alchemist" and "Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs" and it's not quite as worthless as either of those. Still, impossible to recommend.