As above, so below

Horned deity, Gundestrup cauldron

Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones.
Collins, 2000 (1975).

In Diana Wynne Jones’s novel Sirius – the name in Greek means ‘scorcher’ – is the so-called ‘luminary’ of Alpha Canis Majoris, the brightest star of the constellation Canis Major. Known as the Dog Star it’s the principal body in a binary star system, its companion being a white dwarf, a degraded star the size of Earth.

But in this tale Sirius and his fellow luminaries are akin to the gods of classical myth: more than mere personifications of stellar bodies they are tutelary spirits who guard or protect the entities they’re named after. With each jealous of their place in the celestial hierarchy all indulge in Byzantine diplomacy, calling each other Effulgency while firmly asserting what they see as their rights and privileges.

Sirius, however, is in trouble: accused of killing a fellow luminary after a loss of temper, and then losing an object called the Zoi, he is condemned to be incarnated as a puppy, on Earth, which is where the Zoi appears to have ended up. And more is to befall him: having been born in a dog’s body as one of a litter of mongrel puppies to a pedigree bitch he, together with his siblings, is destined to be placed in a sack and dumped in a river. His earthly sentence seems about to end just as soon as it has begun.

Orion the hunter (centre) accompanied by Canis Major

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Heraclitus

What I get out of revisiting a book I once enjoyed is not just more of the same but also the sense of it not being exactly the same as I remembered it. So when I first enjoyed Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy Dogsbody I thought that I’d got a handle on it and that my review essentially said all I’d wanted to say about it.

But a recent reread confirmed Herclitus’s dictum: this time Dogsbody was not the same book, largely because I was not the same man. What I’d comfortably taken, using the fantasy’s title as a clue, as effectively a retelling of the Cinderella story, plus a few additional mythic echoes, I now found was more complex and perhaps profounder than I’d suspected. But complex and profound though this may be there was still the same mischievous spark of humour that I remembered from before.

Fate takes a hand and Sirius’s death sentence is commuted to becoming the pet of one Kathleen O’Brien. She it is who is the Cinderella figure who is forced to act the part of a drudge in the Duffield family, having been taken in by her mother’s brother; her father is an Irish Nationalist who has been imprisoned as a terrorist in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and Kathleen has no one else but the Duffields to look after her. Having rescued Sirius, whom she calls Leo, Kathleen’s only consolation in her life as a dogsbody is the rapidly growing puppy which, naturally enough, causes the expected mayhem, therey eliciting the extreme displeasure of her uncle’s wife.

The plot, convoluted enough to be enjoyed for its twists and turns, pivots on whether Sirius is able to locate the mysterious Zoi in whatever form it takes, and in working out how and why and by whom he has been framed for the murder of a luminary. But as above, so below: this is also a touching human story, how the despised Kathleen loves and remains loyal to her pet through thick and thin, and how selfishness and prejudice test the patience and resilience of the innocent. Leavening the casual cruelty of some of the characters are whimsical sections, largely concerned with the brothers Basil and Robin Duffield, the Duffields’ three cats, and Sirius’s canine siblings which, surprisingly, have also survived their watery ordeal.

So, Dogsbody is a quest story as well as a Cinderella story (though the ‘rags to riches’ aspect doesn’t involve Kathleen achieving princess status). In addition I now see it as coloured by motifs from ‘Beauty and the Beast’, particularly the classical ‘Cupid and Psyche’ version that was first told in Metamorphosis or the Golden Ass by the Roman novelist Apuleius. Kathleen, abandoned with relatives in England and subjected to tribulations, is a kind of Psyche, and Sirius takes the role of Cupid who was reputed to take the shape of a winged serpent because Psyche was never supposed to see his true nature.

In fact, the more I think about Dogsbody the more classical references I see woven into the plot. Sirius, as tutelary spirit of a star, could be termed an animus, a Latin term with a variety of meanings including “breath, life, soul”; Psyche, the role Kathleen takes, is a Greek word meaning “soul”; the Zoi, for which Sirius quests, is related to the Greek zoë which means “life”. The root of Zoi leads me on to the Zodiac which is also alluded to in the novel: as well as being the Dog Star, Sirius is called Leo by Kathleen, who as a maiden is the equivalent of Virgo; when she loses her temper and smashes up Mrs Duffield’s pottery she is almost literally a Bull in a china shop; and the constellation of Orion too has a part to play in the role of a horned hunter as Arawn, the Welsh lord of the Underworld. Once the earnest literary detective starts the mythical clues seem endless, as the author herself implies when she has Kathleen reading bedtime stories like ‘Bluebeard’ aloud to a dog which, unbeknown to her, understands every word she says.

Myth was a source Diana Wynne Jones was to return to throughout her writing life: for example Eight Days of Luke drew from Norse myth in the 1970s, while three decades later The Game (2007) involved Greek deities and a concept called the mythosphere. But because as we all know the gods are like petulant children playing at grown-ups, her skill was to draw the reader into the human dramas she narrated, tragedies as well as comedies, blithely ignoring the convention that children’s fiction should be undemanding.

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Note. Dogsbody shouldn’t be confused with Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius (1944), a speculative novel set in North Wales during the Second World War though it’s, incidentally, well worth a read

https://webereading.com/2023/01/marchmagics-2023-all-good-things.html

Read for #MarchMagics, Kristen of @WeBeReading’s celebration of the work of Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett, and for Paula of @bookjotter’s #ReadingWalesMonth: Diana’s father was Welsh, and Dogsbody brings in Arawn from The Mabinogion as a named character in this fantasy.

https://bookjotter.com/2023/02/05/are-you-looking-forward-to-reading-wales-2023/