I don’t cry at books. I just don’t. I must have cried at books when I was a boy, before I entered adulthood at the age of 13 with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the work of Ian Fleming and Tom Wolfe, but I don’t remember doing so. Catch me watching a romcom at 30,000 feet after two glasses of champagne and you’ll see a gibbering wreck, but I literally can’t remember the last book that brought a tear to my eye. Until this one.
Tony Parsons wrote Man & Boy in 1999, a brilliantly engaging novel that won book of the year, made its writer rich, and launched a number of equally successful sequels. Recently Parsons has been producing crime novels, but this return to his own very successful genre was caused by a real-life relationship.
I first met Stan — Parsons’s ruby-coloured Cavalier King Charles Spaniel — in his Hampstead kitchen over a decade ago when I went to interview him about his relationship with David Bowie. This was before I was a dog man myself, and before I started my own relationship with a small white Maltipoo called Louis, so I didn’t really understand the bond between Tony and Stan. But over the intervening years, when Tony talked about his dog nearly as often as his wife, the appeal of Japan or the vagaries of Arsenal, I learned to comprehend.
This book, a memoir, is the story of that relationship, and it’s a book every dog lover should read. I’m sure there are people in the world who might find it mawkish or overly sentimental, but then I suppose there are also people in the world who don’t appreciate the work of Frank Sinatra, David Lean or JMW Turner.
What this book does, carefully and mostly rather wonderfully, is describe the intricate and often quite codependent relationship between humans and animals, in a way I’ve never really read before. Certainly not in a memoir. Of course, it’s obviously quite possible that people who don’t own dogs are going to be completely unmoved by it, but then maybe it might actually make them consider getting one.
A dog’s needs
It’s called “A Love Story”, but at its heart, Man & Dog is a book about domesticity and routine, which casts into light one of life’s great learnings — and one which only really comes with age — that it’s the small things which turn out to be big, and the big things which turn out to be small.
The book also manages to avoid cliché. There is a tendency to ascribe particular personalities to dogs — especially in this age of Instagram, AI and memes — but Parsons thankfully doesn’t buy into the whole anthropomorphic trope. His trick is to try and understand what Stan wants from the relationship (other than food, shelter, affection and exercise), rather than the other way round.
This is probably the most affecting thing about the book, coupled obviously with Parsons’s love for his friend. He has written before, at length, and with great profundity, about spousal love, familial love, unconditional love, and the often unspoken love we have between friends. What he’d never written about before is the love between an adult and a child who will never grow up. He has now.
A fitting legacy
I wouldn’t be surprised if this book becomes Parsons’s legacy. Initially recognised as being one of the most strident journalistic voices during punk (shouting righteously at the likes of the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Ramones), then as a TV pundit (tearing strips off overreaching film directors, luvvies and over-lyrical novelists), and most recently as a novelist (like Nick Hornby, paring his books like a chef reduces a sauce), I think this book will turn out to be the thing which people remember him for.
But if you cry at the end, don’t come crying to me. You have been warned.
Man & Dog: A Love Story by Tony Parsons is out now (Dorling Kindersley, £20)
