6 hours ago
15
Toxic masculinity, that repressed and repressive male energy that does so much to fuel brutality and abuse, sometimes finds itself on the brink of a vulnerable homoeroticism. In Djamel White’s debut novel All Them Dogs, a vividly propulsive neo-noir, two violent men discover that murderous desires can lead to love as well as death. This is a fast-paced crime thriller with a psychosexual twist, set in a dangerously Freudian arena of Eros and Thanatos.
On the run for five years after killing a man in a gang fight, Tony Ward has returned to the badlands of west Dublin under the protection of a local crime boss. Teamed up with tall and sullen enforcer Darren “Flute” Walsh, Tony is back on his home turf grafting a grim routine of collecting debts and drug dealer’s dues. Propelled through a world of old scores and hard knocks, our protagonist is a shark who has to keep moving simply to survive. But when he and Flute are called upon to kill a failing dealer, their brutal conspiracy becomes a visceral dance of desire and betrayal.
Djamel White is poised as a powerful new voice in Irish literature. His ability to conjure a downbeat world of rundown estates, boxing gyms and tattoo parlours is truly compelling, and there’s a real dynamism to his prose that combines street slang with poetic simile. Like its sharklike protagonist, the narrative rarely stops moving, and the strength of the novel lies in this episodic quality: the gritty realism of each scene is confidently portrayed and exuberantly realised.
The plotting, however, seems a little imposed and overcomplicated. And the heart of the story, the doomed love between Tony and Flute, risks getting lost in the confusion. There’s a great moment when the erotic spark between the two suddenly ignites at a student party they gatecrash. But after that it seems only to catch fire intermittently, scarcely enough to feed the burning sense of longing and suspicion that Tony is meant to feel later. Both men present as blank slates in terms of sexuality, which could add to the intensity of their predicament, but instead seems to dissipate into an obscure and alienated state of desire. Amid a disjointed sex scene there’s an intriguing exchange when Tony tells Flute: “I just didn’t know if you’ve done it before, that’s all,” and it’s uncertain whether they are talking about killing or sex with another man. Tragically, their emotional joint enterprise seems more secure in the former than the latter.
“But where was the rage?” Tony wonders later as he tries to summon the courage to take revenge on Flute for a past treachery. And one feels that perhaps there wasn’t enough passion in the first place, that their luckless relationship could have been more developed to give a real poignancy to the lethally heartfelt double-cross of its denouement. It’s a noir trope, after all, with the tall and surly Flute shaping up as homme fatale. There are glimpses of tender feelings that seem oddly coy. At one point, Tony wistfully imagines them together in a “daydream of beaches and cocktails and cutting shapes on the dancefloor and not a single glance over our shoulders”. A fiercer sexual and emotional charge might have provided a stronger counterpoint to the more heightened violence that follows.
All Them Dogs has ambitions beyond the harsh restrictions of the crime genre, with a first-person stream of consciousness that follows Chekhov’s notion that that the writer’s duty is to take the part of the guilty men. The character of Tony is a bold choice for this endeavour, often appearing an arrogant bully beyond the reach of even his author’s compassion. And though many frailties are revealed below the braggadocio, the true emotions and psychosexuality of this angry and battered male psyche remain unknowable. But perhaps that’s part of the realism of this novel.
