(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
There are some books you read, and then are others, and good lord if Good Boy by Michelle Wright isn’t one of them, that you experience, you live, you breathe and you don’t soon forget.
A novel about the most unique of second chances, which doesn’t sugarcoat the brokenness of life and which acknowledges that even good new things coming out of bad old ones are never as good a you hope they’ll be (and yet sometimes they are better … in parts, anyway), Good Boy breaks your heart, heals your heart and then breaks it all over again.
The reason it can get away with such readerly emotional vandalism is that Wright imbues the story, right from the very start, with such rich characterisation and an immediate sense of time and place that you pretty much immediately are willing to go wherever she takes you.
Or rather, where protagonist Cookie, an inmate at Middleborough minimum-security prison in central Victoria takes you as he comes to grips, mere months away from finishing up a twenty-year non-parole period for murder, with a development in his prison life which has the capacity to change everything.
With a little reluctance but convinced by a prison staff member that this could really set his post-prison life on a very good path, Cookie signs up for a last-chance rehabilitation program for abandoned dogs who would otherwise be put down.
Back in the unit, Cookie out Nigel in his crate. He dipped his middle finger into the water bowl and raised it above the dog’s head. As a drip fell onto his forehead, Cookie brought his face close to Nigel’s and whispered, ‘I hereby rechristen you “Good Boy”.’
Cookie is assigned Nigel, whose name is quickly changed to Good Boy because what dog doesn’t want that he is one on a regular basis, a chocolate with entrenched behavioural issues including what feels like neverending anxiety which manifests in a chewed tale and whining so loud he keeps his fellow inmates in neighbouring rooms awake or ruins their TV watching.
If Cookie succeeds in rehabilitating Good Boy, he can be adopted and find a forever home; but if he doesn’t then his canine charge will be put down, a horrifyingly abstract concept to Cookie who, as he becomes more and more attached to Good Boy, can’t begin to stomach the idea of his vulnerable new companion finding anything but future happiness.
Alternating between the present and the past, Good Boy soon establishes why, beyond a mere instinctive love of animals, Cookie is so invested in getting Good Boy over the line, with the wall-chewing dog representing the sort of second chance Cookie increasingly fails to see himself availing.
But all the hard work, and yes, chill out dog drugs in the world, can’t make Good Boy into a star, escaping-near-certain-death pupil and Cookie has to finally admit to himself that though he wants Good Boy to excel and become the perfect pet for some lucky people that that is unlikely to ne figuring in his future.
All of which leaves Cookie in a difficult position – if he can’t save Good Boy through officially mandated channels, which comes with unwavering parameter which must be met or else, then he has to decide what he will do to give his very good boy a much-deserved shot at life beyond the likely gallows.
(courtesy official Michelle Wright Facebook page)
Quite what that might be must be left to the reading of this spectacularly deeply moving novel which quietly and with great nuanced empathy, explores how ideas of redemption and healing are gloriously appealing but so complicated and difficult to achieve.
Not that Cookie is looking for anything of the kind when he takes Good Boy on, but as his charge’s training takes one step forward and about a thousand back, he begins to realise that in saving Good Boy, or at least trying to save him, that he could be trying to redeem himself as well.
Cookie, to put it mildly, has not had the easiest of lives, the exact details of which must be excised here lest we wander too far into spoilers territory, but suffice to say that after being abandoned by his mother and left with his unfeelingly abusive criminal dad, Cookie’s has had the furthest from a charmed existence it is possible to have.
There are a few bright lights in his blighted life, mostly in the form of a teacher at school who goes to great lengths to rescue Cookie, or least try to, as he grows into young adulthood, but some lives can’t be rescued and people saved, and Cookie is ruefully aware of it.
It’s not until Good Boy is assigned to him, with all this troubles and likely death sentence all but assured, that he realises his innate need to redeem himself by saving Good Boy from an all but certain fate.
Why the hell hasn’t he rehearsed what he was going to say? It’s not like he hadn’t had time. Too late now. His mind was blank. He could just say, ‘Hello.’ That’d be a start. But that’d commit him to another sentence and another. And he didn’t know where he wanted it to go, what he wanted to hear. Instead, he hung up.
Good Boy is a love song to the deep bonds between people and their dogs, arguing that who is saving whom is arguable and that far from human benevolence saving a canine victim that it could very well work in the opposite direction.
Which it certainly does for Cookie who begins to realise that he can’t surrender Good Boy to certain death and that whatever he decides to do, it will likely be at his expense.
The love and selflessness at the heart of this wholly affecting and quite beautifully wrenching story is something to be hold and it’s impossible to read Good Boy and feel things, and feel them DEEPLY.
You can’t just wander through the chapters and skip over the pages; Good Boy demands all or nothing in its quietly unassuming but tremendously moving way, asking you to imagine what might happen if you were placed in the same position and had to decided how far you’d go, even at your own expense, to save the live of another and to play an active role in their redemption.
Wright has written a brilliantly affecting novel with Good Boy the sort of story that seizes your soul, captivates your heart and demands you put all of yourself into it as you grapple with the eternal battle between great brokenness and vaulting redemption and whether everyone gets to land where they want to when it comes to this impossible spectrum of human loss and healing on which Cookie and Good Boy find themselves for better or ill.