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Dog Eat Rat

by Tom Walmsley

The characters in Toronto poet and playwright Tom Walmsley’s new novel, Dog Eat Rat, have sex. Some of them have other occupations, like private investigator, but their jobs leave them empty and with a lot of time to kill.

The novel begins with Ginger, Trip, and Aidan, who all work for the same P.I. agency, together on a stakeout. Ginger and Trip become sexually involved, as do Trip and Aidan. Ginger is also in a relationship with the agency’s owner, Rodney. Suzi, a lover of Trip’s, wants to become a private investigator as well. She has sex with Ginger. Ginger and Trip investigate the extramarital shenanigans of Rebecca, who is married to George. Trip has sex with Rebecca (who wouldn’t mind turning it into a three-way with Aidan). Ginger has sex with George. George has sex with Suzi.

Given that the novel is only 180 pages long, this is a very up-tempo game of musical beds. But despite many hinted-at perversities, which mostly seem to involve voyeurism and power exchange role-playing, the action is not at all pornographic. When the buttons fly off, the curtain quickly comes down. Walmsley is less interested in sex than seduction, as perfunctory as that often turns out to be. Women simply give themselves up to George, while Trip’s mojo is ascribed to “magical powers.” The coupling becomes automatic, fated, almost unconscious. “You’d fuck a handful of mud,” Ginger says to Rodney. “And you’d fuck a broom handle,” he replies. Rebecca considers all this to be a foreshadowing of the afterworld. “Everyone’s naked in Hell,” is how she puts it to Trip. “Hell makes you horny.”

This religious angle is obviously important in the novel, but remains undeveloped. Sex, it seems, is a kind of displaced spirituality. Rebecca has erotic fantasies while saying her Rosary, and Trip, a lapsed Catholic with a crucifix “almost the size of the original,” is afraid he may be “too kinky for God.” But these two aren’t presented in enough depth for us to relate to their spiritual crises. In particular, Trip, a character who shares some of his biography with Walmsley (a liver transplant, a penchant for writing haiku), is almost entirely a cipher. We are left to guess at the existential depths lying beneath his priapic facade. As for the rest of the cast, spiritual emptiness is hardly distinguishable from the boredom brought on by a series of losing battles against the desires of the flesh.

 

Reviewer: Alex Good

Publisher: Mansfield Press

DETAILS

Price: $16.95

Page Count: 184 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-89446-942-5

Released: Nov.

Issue Date: 2010-1

Categories: Fiction: Novels