Somewhere around the middle of All Them Dogs there is a pub by the Liffey with tinsel hanging off the ceiling, and three people at a high table sharing two pizzas from a food truck outside. It is Stephen's Day. One of them has been given a jumper and a bottle of aftershave, wrapped in paper with snowmen on it, and he is so unused to being given anything that he has to swallow before he can speak.
Nothing happens in that chapter. I read it twice. Then I read the rest of the book with my stomach in a knot, because I already knew what kind of novel I was in.
Djamel White is twenty-eight and this is the first thing he has published. I would like to state that plainly before I say anything else, because the sustained control of the voice here is not what a first novel usually sounds like.
All Them Dogs: Two Days, One Head, No Way Out
I read it in two sittings, which is not how I usually read anything on a prize longlist, and that is entirely down to the narrator.
His name is Tony Ward. He is back in West Dublin after five years in England, where he went in a hurry after a young lad died on a green during a heatwave. He drives an old baby-blue Opel that used to belong to his mother. He takes a job collecting debts for a man called Darren Walsh, who everyone still calls Flute because of something that happened in school.
The whole novel is Tony talking. Djamel White gives you no other perspective, no chapter breaks into anyone else's head, no authorial hand reaching in to explain the slang or apologise for him. You get gaffs and bandos, snapping and paro, fellas getting clipped, and you work it all out the way you would work out a new workplace. It took me about fifteen pages and after that I stopped noticing.
What All Them Dogs Does That I Have Not Seen Done This Well
He writes a narrator who is lying to himself in real time and never lets him catch on.
Tony will tell you flatly that he felt nothing after he killed someone. Not guilt, he says, not even something that could be confused for guilt. Two chapters later he walks across a field, steps on the exact patch of grass where it happened, and stops.
Tony will tell you that he does not think about Darren Walsh, immediately after four hundred words on the man's mouth, his cheekbones, the way water runs off his bottom lip, the way the car smells lighter when he gets out of it. Tony will tell you that the man who took him on at sixteen, gave him a ring and a nickname and a song and told him he loved the bones of him, was the only person who ever looked out for him.
The book never contradicts him. Not once. It simply arranges the evidence and lets you sit with what you can see and he cannot. When another character finally says the true word for what that older man was doing, roughly two-thirds of the way in, I put the book down and went and made tea.
All Them Dogs Is the Funniest Book on This Longlist
I want to be honest that I laughed a lot, because it matters to how the ending works.
There is a dealer called Finto whose laugh is one short honk, as if he is trying to cough up a cufflink. There is a scene involving a six-foot-four man and the back seat of an early Opel Corsa that had me making noise on public transport. There is a mindfulness class in a room above a dentist's. There is a gunrunner in Ugg boots who has given a revolver a pet name and delivers a short, sincere lecture on how the hardest part of shooting a friend is making it look easy afterwards.
And then Djamel White spends that goodwill. Every joke has been a small deposit, and the last forty pages withdraw all of it at once, in a boxing gym, during a children's bout. I am not going to describe what happens. I will say that I had a physical reaction to one paragraph, and that I have been trying since to decide whether the book earned it or reached for it. I have landed on: mostly earned, and slightly reached.
Where All Them Dogs Falters
The plot is the weak part, and the novel is oddly upfront about this. Tony himself says twice that the way the pieces fit is too neat, which is a clever bit of cover, and it is still cover. A vengeful relative wanders alone into the organisation's own local, picks a fight at the jukebox, tags a shop directly under a CCTV camera and then attempts a murder through a windscreen from an implausible distance. Three separate coincidences hold the last act up, and I noticed all three while it was happening.
There is a young mother called Gemma who is threatened, robbed of her peace and eventually very badly hurt, almost all of it in service of showing us what Tony has become. She gets one extraordinary scene in a hallway with a cast on her hand and a line about how the question is not what he did but how many times. It is a better character than the book bothers to write.
And Fanny Lavelle, who is the most interesting person here by a distance, an undergraduate with a plan and a father she has correctly assessed, is simply gone by the end. I wanted a page. I would take a paragraph.
The Title All Them Dogs Does Not Mean What You Think
I assumed, from the cover and the first chapter, that the dogs were the men. They are, but not in the way I expected.
There is an old Jack Russell in the first scene, wandering a filthy hallway looking for someone to feed it, and the same breed of dog turns up later sniffing at something in a road that I will not describe. There is a bull breed being kept for stud money. There is a man described as having the eyes of a dog that watches you without wagging. There is a lad who was kept around, as another character puts it, the way you keep something rabid until you need it.
Nobody in this novel explains that. Djamel White never once stops to underline it. By the last chapter, when the narrator hands himself over to the one authority figure who never wanted anything from him, the metaphor has done its work quietly and completely, and nobody in this book chose the kennel they were born into.
For what it is worth, the closeted young men of Ireland now have places to go that Tony Ward does not appear to know exist, and BeLonG To is one of them. The novel is set in a world where saying it out loud is a survivable thing to do, and its narrator does not believe that for a second, and that gap is the saddest thing in the book.
A note on content, because this one needs it: several killings; a young girl who does not survive the last act; a woman very badly beaten off the page; dealing and heavy use throughout; a scene in which the narrator holds a gun to his own head; explicit sex; grooming named directly though never depicted; and language that does not let up from the first line.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Douglas Stuart is the obvious next stop and he happens to be on this same longlist, so start with John of John, or go back to Young Mungo for two boys and a city that will not allow it. If it is the voice you want rather than the subject, Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen does something comparable with a Northern Irish narrator whose comedy is also a defence mechanism. And if you want the older, statelier version of Irish men talking themselves in circles around their own violence, Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry is waiting.
Where All Them Dogs Leaves You
I keep returning to the fact that the happiest this man ever gets, in twenty-eight years, is a food-truck pizza in a pub with fairy lights, sitting between two people who like him. He says out loud that it is the best pizza he has ever had. He wonders why his whole life could not be that way.
Nobody in the book answers him. Djamel White does not answer him either, which I think is the right call, and which is why I have been carrying this one around for days.
If you take one thing from All Them Dogs, let it be that scene rather than the shooting everybody will end up talking about.