The Dog Master

June 1, 2015
Bestseller Cameron’s (A Dog’s Purpose) latest imagines a pivotal moment in the history of human-animal relations. It’s 30,000 years ago, and we meet two tribes of primitive human beings: the Wolfen, as represented by Silex the hunter, and the Kindred, as represented by Calli, who is in love with one man but is forced by custom to wed another. She gives birth to Mal, who is born with a deformed leg, a death sentence because the tribe members think he is cursed. Calli performs some political maneuvering in order to have her son’s life spared. Mal grows up and falls in love with Lyra, who paints primitive figures on cave walls. A jealous suitor, Grat, forces Mal into exile so he can have Lyra all to himself. Living on his own, Mal comes across a wolf cub. He domesticates the creature and even puts a leash on her so they can hunt together. But he finds his life in jeopardy after he encounters Silex’s tribe, whose members worship and emulate wolves, and find the leash anathema. Cameron tells his story in a needlessly complicated manner, mixing Upper Paleolithic past with the present. The use of weddings, engagements, and tribal councils to dramatize Calli and Silex’s existence seems too anachronistic. And except for the depiction of the first dog (a domesticated wolf), there’s little in this post-Neanderthal bildungsroman we haven’t seen before in The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media Group.

June 1, 2015
Cameron (The Dogs of Christmas, 2013, etc.) returns to a time when woolly mammoth and Neanderthal roamed the Earth and watches as human meets wolf-who-becomes-dog. Professor James Morby rejects the idea that evolution is always a "glacial process," positing instead "that a species might evolve in giant steps"-particularly as it applies to the relationship between people and dogs. At a French dig, Morby believes archaeologists have found "The dog"-a skeleton of a prehistoric wolf wearing a collar and buried alongside a man. The short Morby scenes give the book nuance, but the overly long story focuses on prehistoric peoples 30,000 years past as they endure a mini-ice age. The clans include the Kindred, hunter-gatherers, and the Wolfen, hunters following wolf packs as those animals seek prey. There's much imagination here, albeit the Ur-human proclivity for sex, love, jealousy, anger, pettiness, and revenge plays out in near-modern syntax, with much "Good summer to you!" sans caveman grunts and snorts. There too is superstition: young Mal is driven from the Kindred because he was born with a deformed leg. Mal cannot hunt-be a spearman-and so, after much female machination, he's labeled a curse and exiled. Alone, he follows a mortally wounded pregnant she-wolf into a cave. There, he sustains her and soon bonds with her surviving pup, a female he names Brotherly Dog-Dog Fraternus. While there's little anthropomorphization when man begins to interact with wolf, there's much danger and bloodletting as Kindred and Wolfen meet bears, giant lions, and "strange men, with faces smeared with charcoal and rouge....Hideous, wild-looking men....Cohort" and "the Frightened Ones," no doubt Neanderthals. Interesting speculative history with a satisfying conclusion, one opening the door for a sequel or series.

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March 1, 2015

In the final, fierce Ice Age, a she-wolf learns that humans will share food in hungry times, a lesson she passes on to her descendants--including a wolf cub saved by the unfortunate Mal, cast out of his tribe because of his deformed foot even as another, more bloodthirsty tribe invades the valley. The closeness between Mal and that cute cub, which he names Dog, presages the enduring human-canine bond today. With a $300,000 marketing plan; from an author who performs New York Times best-selling magic with dog stories (e.g., A Dog's Purpose).

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