It really is a dog’s life

 Three Wild Dogs and the Truth: A Memoir ★★★★
Markus Zusak 
Macmillan

A kind-eyed Border collie named Panda, who would only come into the house during thunderstorms, and would watch him while he did his homework. 

This is Markus Zusak's first memory of a dog. 

Fast-forward 40-odd years later and the author of the best-selling novel The Book Thief has penned his first work of nonfiction, Three Wild Dogs and the Truth: A Memoir; an homage to a trio of rambunctious brakke who shaped his life in indelible ways, as much as it is a rumination on family, loss, the act of loving, and appreciating the wilderness within.

“I wish I could go back and bring him into my house now, where I'm in charge,” says Zusak of Panda, who was confined to the great Australian outdoors. 

But was he ever truly in charge when it came to “big, bad and brindled” Reuben; Archer, “a handsome blonde with honey-gold eyes, and legs with a lineage to royalty, or at the very least, Grace Kelly”; and the “big, boisterous white, wiry-furred pound dog”, Frosty?

“I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I was in as much control as probably almost anyone could have been without making them my full-time job,” Zusak grins.

As a part-time side-hustle, his mantra was, “Oh, just get these dogs through their lives without them really hurting someone.” He evokes the memory of bringing his three-day-old son home from the hospital, when Reuben, upon noticing the infant lunged at him, “a definite move to attack”, Zusak writes.

“And this is what I love and I think this is what's underneath your question: control, chaos, the contradictions of these animals and their life is actually really complex. We had some pretty wild times and shit happened, let's face it,” he shrugs. “But that's part of the loyalty. Loyalty doesn't mean perfect behaviour all the time. Loyalty goes both ways, where part of loyalty is great. Forgiveness as well. And I think our animals have forgiven us as much as we've had to forgive them.”

Other than “wild”, how, in three words, would he describe the Unruly Trinity?

“Wow, that's a tough one!” He takes a moment to consider his answer, replying: “Reuben: Zuzek spirit animal, Archer: trouble, but gentleman, Frosty: friendliest, but naughtiest.

“It was such a joy writing this book because these dogs that I lost ... I'm starting to get a bit teary now thinking of them ...” He pauses as his mind diverts to the now-dead Reuben and Archer: “It just let me be near them again, they were with me again,” he blinks away his gathering tears.

He equates writing about them to dreams he's had where they've gone off into the ocean, where he can never quite reach them, and finding himself in his parents' house (“that's the kind of surrealness of dreams”) and him going “I dunno where my dogs are”. Yet et voilà: they come walking down the driveway, he embraces them, their wet and salty coats as tangible as if he were reliving it. “Writing the book just brought them even nearer to me again.” 

Don Corleone, eat your heart out, for Zusak remembers Reuben and Archer as “gangsters, like a two-dog mafia. God, they were great! You'd walk them down the street and other people would pick their little dogs up,” he says. Not as majestic in stature as an Irish Wolfhound or Alaskan Malamute but their presence, especially together, was “like positive and negative charge; like creating lighting”.

“I think we spent so much of our lives not appreciating this moment and I think they're a great lesson for me in that. Not that I didn't appreciate them at the time, I really loved them, but I feel like I'd give anything to have 10 more minutes with each of those dogs.”

What did he learn from Reuben and Archer?

“They taught me I could really put up with a lot,” he chuckles. “And I talk about this wilderness within: what is that wilderness within? And to me, I think it's not so much that idea of, 'oh, we've all got a wild animal inside us and we have survival instincts and we've got this idea of toughness and willingness to kill if we have to'. I think what I'm talking about is the idea of having — and really enjoying — moments of real intensity.”

He describes penning his memory of driving a dying Reuben to the emergency vet, yelling “Reuben! Don't you die, you bastard!” as his favourite part of the book.

“And people think I'm crazy, they think I'm nuts when I say my favourite part of that whole story, or that little chapter in the book, is me running through the doors of the emergency vet with the big metal frame doorway and smashing his head on the door frame. I love that that happened! Because that summed up our life together: me swearing at him and him thinking 'Oh God, I can't even die in peace'. And he had such a hard head ...”

They taught him how to appreciate that wilderness within, he elaborates: the idea of living a life that has intensity in it. He correlates a dog dying or having to put your dog down not with melancholy, but profundity: “These are moments that you look back on and you go, 'God, I've got a good life'; that I felt that I felt something so intensely then, even if that thing was losing something. I look at being able to take my dogs to get put down — and feeling that tremendous sense of loss — as one of the top five moments of my life, because I understood how incredibly hard I love them. And so I count myself really lucky.

“Mostly I've learnt to be grateful for all of the chaos and the beauty and the tragedy to be wrapped up into this one timeline.”

How intensely did he feel while writing about his dogs? 

“I just remember laughing a lot, recalling memories and really appreciating my family. In a lot of ways it's so much about us and appreciating Mika, my wife, and my two kids who grew up with these two big brutes and — God, those dogs were such a huge part of their lives!” he beams. “And I'm really proud of them for that. They would never forget our dogs.”

Readers often assume that writing about his dogs dying must have been so hard to write about, he shares. Not so!

“I probably enjoyed writing those parts the most because it's my way of honouring them, and having my 10 minutes with them again.”

He recollects the memory of his 14-year-old self reading SE Hinton's classic YA novel, The Outsiders, and knowing it's fiction but believing it when he's in it. “That's the thing that made me want to be a writer.

“The intensity of writing about the dogs dying and really feeling myself get emotional like that, to me, you go to that place where you're believing you're there and that's what you're trying to produce. That's always the best moment, when you go, 'Ah, it's real!' It's the magic act of turning black words on a white page into someone actually being inside that book.

“It reminded me of being 16 again and trying to write my first novel, in the sense of the joy of going, 'I'm doing it, I'm actually doing it!' I think that's why I'm so grateful to all three of these dogs and the two cats we had, and my family to have had that freedom.”

Curs aside, Zusak writes about the exuberant feline duo, Brutus and Bijoux, remembering them with tenderness, love and honesty (they mastered the art of indoor micturition).

“If Brutus was still alive, he'd be in here sitting on my keyboard because he would always sit on something warm,” Zusak recalls. “They were real characters and I really wanted the book to be anecdotal. There are a lot of books about dogs and they're quiet philosophising about animal behaviour and dog behaviour. I wanted to touch on a few ... not philosophical things ... but just how we think about animals. Like when you realise you're feeding your animals other animals,” he bashfully grins. “The flipside with this is not wanting to have any veneers in writing this: if I whinged and complained about the bloody cats, that's what I'm going to talk about. It's not an Instagram post showing our beautiful pets, it's showing them as beautiful, but also complex and hilarious and vicious. And same with us as the humans.”

Zusak notes how, when writing nonfiction, you have to show people who you truly are, and this extends to his dogs: their loving natures aside, they've killed a cat, killed a possum and bitten his children's piano teacher. Did he ever feel he had to limit himself regarding how much he'd like to reveal about his dogs' true selves?

“It was such a joy to reminisce, even though some of this stuff was not funny at the time, especially the piano teacher incident.” He compares the severity of his hounds' misdemeanours: when there's a human involved its far more serious than cat slaughter.

“I sat there with my head in my hands and went 'thank God', which isn't really the reaction people are expecting but at least there was no more human involvement, which immediately takes out 99.9% of the worry. It was a really terrible moment ...”

He likens writing a book to building a brick wall, comprising a sufficient number of bricks to keep it standing but not too many either, resulting in having to make choices, one of which was to remain truthful: “There definitely weren't any worse incidents than what were written in the book.

“Reuben and Archer were protectors, whereas Frosty wasn't a protector and I've had some pretty close calls with him. If someone comes to our house, it's no problem. He's not a threat to humans but he was a real hunter compared to the other two. If we were down the coast on the beach, and I alluded to it ... but if Frosty saw a kangaroo, he was gone!” he grins.

Zusak adds that, as a novelist, he's never written short stories, yet he likes the idea of a short story being a part of the whole story: “Just let this part tell the whole: the great bits, the terrible bits, the sad bits. And hopefully that tells the whole experience without telling everything.”

On the topic of telling everything: Zusak frequently forthrightly expresses his disdain regarding people who refer to bags used for disposing of canine faecal matter as “poo bags”, preferring the frank “shit bags”.

What does he have to say to those who use the term “poo bags”?

“Just grow up!” he laughs, adding “Can I just say that's probably the best question I've ever been asked! And that's across all my books, as I've always dismissed the idea of people who say 'sugar' when they mean 'shit'.”

Doggone right.