Perhaps the reason genre writers are still endlessly attracted to dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction is that we live in edgy, troubled times where the whole world and life as we know it seems to be constantly teetering on a knife-edge. If it’s not a zombie virus, it’s some manmade or natural contagion or catastrophe and even occasionally, outer space invasion. C.A. Fletcher’s extraordinary and quite magnificent A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World takes its lead to some extent from P.D. James’ Children of Men; an event referred to, bluntly, as ‘The Gelding’ has removed the ability to reproduce. The book’s narrator, Griz, describes it as ‘a soft apocalypse’ and the ageing survivors helped finish the job in ‘the Exchange’, a limited nuclear attack that destroyed many of those who remained. But life goes on for small, isolated groups in remote communities who keep themselves to themselves and have little to do with anyone else, and who often don’t even realise that ‘others’ exist.
Griz and his family live in splendid isolation on an island off the coast of Scotland. Occasionally, they barter with a family on a nearby island. But they have known tragedy; youngest daughter Joy was swept away in an accident years earlier, and Griz’s mother suffered a head injury that has left her silent and withdrawn. The arrival of a sailing boat bearing a plausible, red-bearded stranger named Brand disrupts the family’s equilibrium when he poisons them and sails off with Jess, one of Griz’s dogs. With the family incapacitated, Griz rushes off in pursuit, taking to the sea to follow Brand and rescue his beloved hound. The journey takes Griz and his other faithful dog Jip on a great adventure back to the mainland, the horrors and the beauty of a barren world devoid of human life and yet filled with unimaginable danger and hidden threat.
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World is far more than just another throwaway piece of cheapjack apocalyptic storytelling; this is a stunningly moving, poignant, and melancholy work of literature. It’s a brilliantly written character study of a pragmatic and inventive child’s quiet determination to right a wrong, prepared to risk everything to get back his dog, travelling into the remains of a long-gone world (the book is set a couple of generations after The Gelding), which is vividly and often heartbreakingly evoked, especially when Griz wanders around an overgrown, collapsing Blackpool, spending a night in the shattered remains of the Tower as it’s battered and lashed by an electrical storm.
During his travels into a world he’s not previously even been able to imagine, Griz manages to appreciate the strange, twisted beauty of a world returning to Nature; cities are collapsing in on themselves, motorways are cracked, disintegrating tongues weaving their way across the country. Eventually, Jip having wandered off during the night, Griz meets up with the mysterious, impenetrable John Dark, and the pair forge an unlikely friendship that carries them both through adversity until they are forced apart and finally, terribly, Griz finds what he’s been looking for and much more besides. The reader, too, discovers the truth about Griz even as it seems that victory is wrenched out of his grasp at the bitter end of his journey.
A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World is a sensational piece of work. Fletcher’s writing is powerful, haunting and at times almost poetic in its beauty and there’s imagery here that will live with you forever. Yes, it’s true that there’s an element of ‘with one bound they were free’ at the end of the story and one or two character resolutions are at odds with the beautiful bleakness of much of the text. These are minor quibbles, though, in a book surely destined to stand head and shoulders alongside the very best of this very strange and very compelling subgenre. Buy it and bathe in its brilliance.
A BOY AND HIS DOG AT THE END OF THE WORLD / AUTHOR: C.A. FLETCHER / PUBLISHER: ORBIT / RELEASE DATE: APRIL 23RD
