The Lost Dog [Paperback]

A richly imagined exploration of the myriad connections between art and life, The Lost Dog is part mystery and also part character study of one man, an immigrant in one country and an isolated, misunderstood child in another. Tom Loxley is haunted by his childhood in India, a glamorous, doting mother and a father who although extravagant and a drunk, is able to bring his family to make a new life for themselves in 1970's Australia.

It is these sights, sounds and smells of his ancestral home which shape Tom's attitides to his new country. Even in his mid-thirties, working as a semi-successful literary professor, while also working on a book about Henry James, Tom critically examines those around him, still emotionally attached to his octogenarian mother Iris whose arthritic knees are steadily diminishing her quality of life, and later, his ex-wife, who over the years after their divorce has treated Tom with a mixture of disdain and condescending authority.

Only when Tom suddenly loses his dog in the Australian bush while working on his book, the last vision he sees is of the animal lean and white, rust-spotched, springing up a bank, does his story spring back to seven months earlier, beginning with a painting he sees st an art gallery he hadn't entered in the four years since his wife left. It is here at a group show of four young artists that Tom meets the Chinese-Australian artist and photographer, Nelly Zhang who instantly attracts him with her mysteriousness and ambiguities.

Soon enough he's visiting Nelly at The Preserve, a ramshackle warehouse which serves as her home and studio, which also she shares with her son teenage son, Rory and the beautiful fellow artist Yelena, who "men circle like moons." But it is Nelly that Tom is most emotionally attracted too, even as she stages elaborate scenarios that mimic the solidarity of truth. Tom is a man who seems to exist in a remote world, his days carefully constructed, his concerns about Iris's failing health threatening to consume him, and then there's the problem of what to do about his lost dog.

Certainly, the days he spends at The Preserve, make him realise how acute his loneliness has been, this tightly knit collection of people offering companionship and conversation and reflecting Tom's increasing need for Nelly and for the world that she had created and the sense of being caught up in her wide spate of imaginative work. But in the end Nelly's indistinct world seems to offer more questions than answers: even as she steadily endears herself to Tom, there are ambiguities eddying her surface, the sweetness that ran in her depths, a detailing of good fortune, precluding a failed relationship, a famous husband who went missing, and rumours of an unhappy marriage where there were always arguments about money.

As Tom tries to piece together all these bit and pieces, the little unconnected facts about Nelly's life, while also longing to know more about Nelly's short-lived marriage, he also continues to search for his dog, the missing animal a powerful metaphor for Tom's own life in Australia, where his past childhood in India keeps glimmering to the surface: a declining family of dowager ladies, servants, of a tin-roofed out-bungalow on a tea garden in the Nilgris and a coarse grandfather who had continues to believe in the supremacy of the English race until his death, and a neurotic procession in the form of gurus and lovers winding back to Tom's childhood. Now the estimable Nelly has her own place in Tom's "diaphanous parade."

This novel swirls with kaleidoscopic images of contemporary Australia, de Krester's prose coming across like a churning and whirling abstract painting: the cattle raising their heavy heads, magpies driving their beaks into damp earth, a stand of eucalypts in a park and graffiti on an overpass. The descriptions of urban malls and the outskirts of the city are juxtaposed with a past that constantly waits Tom, as he remembers the aromatic streets of his childhood: the feces animal and human lingering on display, "his youth odorous, unhygienic and refusing to be disposed of with decent haste."

An exhilarating concoction of the past and the present, the author combines the elements of the mystery into a type of intellectual exploration on the nature of art and its place in contemporary society, with Tom - and Nelly - acting as ciphers and symbols for the way we see and view the world. Ultimately history sinks beneath of the imperatives of the present in this novel, a story of one man trying to find his place in a chaotic and senseless world and an artist whose vision is symptomatic of a more profound desire: to drag moments of perception from "the gray ooze of oblivion" into a bright new world. Mike Leonard June 08.

I devoured this book in one sitting. The basic premise is that Tom is in Australia trying to find his dog which has run off; as he continues in his search, we catch glimpses and episodes from his past which make up his whole. The author writes sparsely but beautifully; she does not use elaborate prose or pages of description to create very believable characters. Tom tells us little about himself but page by page I started to really like and root for him. Art is not really a character in the book so much as something which interests some of the characters; I have no interest or liking for it but this didn't get in the way of my enjoying the story.

I was taken aback by how much I liked this book and the exquisite phrasing within it. I will certainly be seeking out another by this author. I won't spoil the ending but I do want to say that my favourite line in the whole novel ends "small against the sky" - once you've read it you'll know what I mean! - and how the simplest of words can conjur up the most beautiful of images.

I was surprised to see some of the low ratings for this book - I really enjoyed it. Yes, it is arty, yes, I did feel there were some ideas that went over my head, and yes it is disjointed in places because of the structure - but the quality of the writing and the intriguing questions thrown up by the plot more than made up for it. An enjoyable and thought-provoking read.