This story of connection, loss and canine friendship might just break your heart

FICTION
Good Boy
Michelle Wright
Allen & Unwin, $34.99

It’s 1997 and Philip “Cookie” Cooke is 37 years old. Imprisoned his entire adult life, the inmates call him Cookie (as in “One Tough Cookie”). He’s not tough, but he has what looks like corroborating evidence – a “clean cut” running from eye to earlobe, suggestive of the slash of a switchblade.

Michelle Wright keeps the reader guessing: what has happened to see him incarcerated so long?

On the eve of his release, Cookie signs up to “pawsitive outcomes”. It’s a last chance saloon for dogs “who didn’t meet society’s expectations”. (A content warning, here: Wright’s comic yet felt evocation of such courses may inspire post-traumatic stress disorder in anyone who has braved the experience.) Like the prisoners, the dogs are unwanted – especially Cookie’s charge, Good Boy, an unusually unpromising pooch. Guilty and plagued with self-hate, Cookie assigns his hopes of forgiveness to Good Boy, the “innocent animal” he cannot bear to see put down.

Explicit analogies between canine and prisoner are injected with little jolts of subtlety, as when Wright notes that not every inmate feels a sense of friendship with man’s bestie: having had bad experiences with “sniffer dogs and the prison K9s”, some would rather be as far from dogs as possible.

There’s a Dickensian vibe to Good Boy, particularly in the tonal beats, the depictions of class, and aspects of the characterisation. Cookie’s childhood is nightmarish: aged five, his mother walks away, and he is raised by his father, a man so crooked even his facial features are lopsided. His father enlists him in con jobs and suffers from a constantly seeping wound (he cuts strips from his ex-wife’s wedding dress to staunch it). Wright houses Cookie’s ex-crim mentor in a fictional Australian village (“Longdon”) and provides him with a suitably prime ministerial address (10 Downing Street). A white picket fence is described as looking, from a distance, like it “had a couple of teeth missing”. Puns moonlight as place names: Cookie’s maximum-security prison is in Hopetoun; things go belly up for him in Balleyup.

This Dickensian tone turns picaresque when Cookie recalls the compassion of his primary-school teacher, Mrs Mitten. She offers to help Cookie after he is expelled from school, having him assist her husband’s travelling circus (“Mitten’s Marvellous Menagerie”). Cookie may not know what a menagerie is (“it sounded a bit grand for this set-up”), but Wright uses the distance between what Cookie understands and what he observes to elaborate his vulnerability and fundamental dependence on others.

Travelling to meet Mrs Mitten after escaping prison, Cookie feeds valium-spiked marshmallows to calm Good Boy, recalling, as a boy, finding Mrs Mitten taking valium and feeling worried that his own “twitchiness, his nervousness, might annoy her.” (His father’s bleeding leg even mirrors Good Boy’s habit of chewing his tail.) As further details of Cookie’s childhood are revealed, dependence is shown to be something that is not limited solely to children: how to behave and relate in a world of rules and expectations is much easier when you have someone showing you the ropes.

There is an undercurrent of social critique animating Good Boy. (“Cruel, nasty, unethical, dishonest people were rewarded every day – with promotions, power, money.”) And as Wright notes, certain crimes come with Old Testament permanence attached: you can be a former member of a profession, say, but never a “former murderer”.

A novel of debts and investments without a CEO or banker in sight, Good Boy explores what it means to care and to forgive. Cookie’s story is at least partly one of learning to live after having been prevented from doing so. He cares for Mr Mitten and Mrs Mitten cares for him. And his care for Good Boy leads him back, eventually, to parts of his own life he has left uncared-for.

Considering this idea of engagements and reciprocities, I recalled how the word, care, comes from the proto-Germanic, karō, meaning lament or grief. Cookie is a grieving man who does not know he is grieving. It is only with the care of others – and with his learning to care for them in turn – that he finally understands he is allowed to do so.

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