A review by grubstlodger
Un cane al tempo degli uomini liberi by Henrietta Branford

3.0

I needed something light between ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Humphrey Clinker’ and settled on ‘Fire, Bed & Bone’ by Henrietta Branford. Expecting a dog’s-eye view of the peasant’s revolt, I got something a little different.


Again, my choice for a little light reading was rather skew-whiff. This book includes torture, murder, disease, animal-cruelty and lots of domestic abuse. With just over 100 pages in a large print, it may be a children’s book and physical light, but it’s not light reading.

While the book is told from the point of view of an un-named dog, it is more about the tenacity of life rather than history. Her masters are swept up in the periphery of the revolt, she hears some talk of King and Barons and they meet John Ball briefly - but in many ways the human lives aren’t important except how they impinge on the dog’s story. We start with her giving birth to three pups and ends with her reflecting on the pups that made it and those that didn’t, concluding that ‘it takes a lot of puppies to make one dog’. The peculiarly bleak take-away from the book being that it’s worth throwing life after life at the wall, in the hope that some survive. (What a mixed metaphor).

The dogs were suitably doggish, lots of attention to body language and smell and a different way of structuring their own society, but they did overhear (and understand) a lot of on-the-nose dialogue about things they couldn’t possibly know or understand. Though there was a doggishness to them, they didn’t quite embody the other-natured quality of animals the way the rabbits in ‘Watership Down’ did but I suppose the dog did live in and around humans.

There was a particularly unnerving chapter where the dogs and humans hang out at an abandoned house and the dogs see peculiar shadow-people with very faint scents that live out some gory period of history. A dog’s-eye view of ghosts in an interesting idea - especially when she then sees her master hover and the air and we know the premonition of hanging only has so long to take place.

Overall, this book was strange and hinted at something stranger still, which its brevity and audience of children meant it couldn’t fully deliver.