I only know Dubai by hearsay, which leads me to picture it as an exitless Las Vegas shopping mall operated by gangster theocrats. Yet, I’ve met people who love it. Joseph O’Neill too good a writer for the verisimilitude of his portrait of the place to matter. It’s irrelevant if the Dubai depicted in The Dog is like or unlike the real location.
The first eighty pages are the funniest and saddest thing I’ve read in a long time. O’Neill’s nameless narrator describes his daily routine—pretending to manage a portion of the family fortune of an old school buddy—in post-2007-crash Dubai …
… an abracadabrapolis in which buildings flopped against each other and skyscrapers looked wobbly or were rumpled or might be twice as tall and slender as the Empire State Building, a city whose coastline featured bizarre man-made peninsulas as well as those already-famous artificial islets known as The World, so named because they were grouped to suggest, to a bird’s eye, a physical map of the world; a city where huge stilts rose out of the earth and disappeared like Jack’s beanstalk, three hundred meters up, into a synthetic cloud. Apparently the cloud contained, or would in due course contain, a platform with a park and other amenities.
After the simultaneous collapse of his marriage and career in New York, O’Neill’s hero finds living in a sci-fi illustration a blast:
… Dubai’s undeclared mission is to make itself indistinguishable from its airport.
Not that he isn’t aware of the anomalies:
… I’d come back from the office every evening to find all evidence of my occupation removed, as if I daily perpetrated a crime that daily needed to be covered up.
He gets glimpses of who does the cleaning, but …
I was confronted with something newly dishonorable about myself: I didn’t want to find out about these people. I did not want to distinguish between one brown face and another. I didn’t want to know whether these persons were Nepalese, Guyanese, Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Kenyans, Malaysians, Filipinos, or Pakistanis. What good did it do? How did it help anyone for me to know the difference? For their part, these women seemed not to want to be differentiated or even seen, because they always scurried away those few times our paths crossed.
But the narrator offers no critique. Moreover, he’s sick of know-it-all day trippers:
I do not align myself with the disparagers. I’ll always remember a certain Western visitor who ominously murmured to himself, for my benefit, My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings—as if the poem were at his fingertips and the dude had not fortuitously run into it while browsing online for some bullshit reason; as if he habitually carried on with himself a quote-filled conversation steeped in the riches of Western civilization and by patrimonial cultural magic bore in his marrow the traces of Sophocles and Erasmus and the School of Salamanca. Oh, how these bozos make me laugh.
The narrator sums himself up when he describes his assistant Mahmud: “Here is someone who accepts without anguish his good fortune. Here is the hero for our times.”
Unfortunately the brilliant beginning isn’t sustained. There is a hint of a missing person mystery that fizzles out. There’s a parade of colorful expatriates that don’t add up to anything. The narrator’s backstory gets (unnecessarily) filled in. Even so, O’Neill has enhanced and updated our awareness of how cities, rooms, places in general shape lives.
[Image: Metaphysical interior with large building (De Chirico, 1916)]
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