A New York lawyer accepts a job offer from an old friend and travels to Dubai to oversee the finances of a super-rich Lebanese family. He is an emotionally devastated, wreck of a man, reeling from a traumatic breakup with a partner who also happened to be a work colleague.
But life in the emirate turns out to be anything like the fresh start he'd been hoping for.
"You ran away," says the wife of a missing diver, Ted Wilson – a character in the novel dubbed "The Man from Atlantis", who disappears in mysterious circumstances. "Everybody out here is on the run. You're all runners."
If this seems like familiar territory, then it is. Joseph O'Neill's last novel, the impressive Netherland, features a man, part Dutch, part American, who is suffering the pain of separation and seeks refuge in the cricket grounds of New York's Staten Island in the aftermath of September 11, mainly playing with South Asian and Caribbean immigrants.
Netherland, published in 2008, also has a character who vanished – Chuck Ramkissoon, who ends up being pulled from a canal with his hands tied behind his back.
O'Neill was not just a fresh voice; he wrote from a new literary place, stretching across continents and trying to make sense of a post-9/11, globalised world. This is somehow an unsurprising place for O'Neill to inhabit – born in Ireland, he also lived in Turkey, Mozambique, Holland and the United States.
In his latest work The Dog [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk], which made the longlist of this year's Man Booker Prize, we are back on familiar ground. Only this time it is a French-speaking man with a Swiss mother who's reeling from a separation and the setting is Dubai, in the aftermath of the global financial crash in 2007-08.
The desert city, then, is the ideal setting where this type of globalised Everyman might search for a new start – an emirate where more than 200 nationalities live and work, from war-torn Middle East to former Soviet states, from the Indian subcontinent to the UAE. But it is particularly the western expatriate set that O'Neill is concerned with and skewers mercilessly. It is a familiar tale – the gluttonous brunches, the casual use of maids and the moral double standards.
The Dog, unsurprisingly, is a story of servitude. Who controls whom and why? The narrator is in a constant argument with himself – reasoning, justifying, qualifying – and trying to run from guilt. Indeed, one of the most effective parts of the book is the vital question the narrator is trying to deal with – how not to do any harm, morally and ethically.
But while the meditations on Dubai – its portrayal as a place where most western expatriates live on exclusive inlets called "Privilege Bay", consider massage chairs indispensable and all drive high-powered 4x4s – have no doubt a great element of truth, these are low-hanging fruit. For those of us who live here, it's fun to read, but hardly instructive and O'Neill never truly manages to get under the surface of life in the emirate. Why do so many people come here and decide to stay?
There are moments of perception – usually detailing personal episodes of desolation, the welfare of labourers and the hypocrisy of western expatriates. One interesting take is on the endless construction in Dubai – what is referred to as a "counterattack on the natural".
"The slightest effort of reflection must yield an awareness of the suffering … that these barren and desolate sands have without cease inflicted on their human inhabitants; and it cannot be a surprise, now that the shoe is on the other foot," reflects our narrator at the rise of the megacity out of the sands.
Another amusing episode is the spectacle of members of the Dubai "diving community" setting out in their Porsches, Bentleys and Ferraris from Dubai to Dibba in a search-and-rescue mission for Ted Wilson. "It was that very rare occasion when one's fictitiousness feels euphorically correct."
A third examines the reactions of many western countries to the financial crash that hit Dubai: "These criticisers, who denounce our carbon footprint from their own catastrophically deforested, coal-built countries … also attacked us, the expats."
These excerpts work well and are a sign that writers will be rewarded if they seriously engage with the story of Dubai. But soon this relapses into the typical critique of a soulless place that only exists for construction – the "abracadabra–polis".
"A Dubai that is not under continuing construction would make less sense. I'm pretty sure that nobody is looking forward to the day when everything has been built and all that remains is the business of being in the buildings."
If this had been O'Neill's debut novel, we'd probably have been raving about his talent and willingness to take the Dubai story on.
It is a worthy effort but never reaches the literary heights of Netherland. Early in The Dog, one of the first hotels that our narrator stays in is the Westin – its tagline – "Between Being and Becoming".
That's exactly what The Dog reads like. A book with superb moments but one that leaves the reader strangely unsatisfied.
John Dennehy is deputy editor of The Review.
jdennehy@thenational.ae
Lost and adrift in Dubai: Joseph O’Neill’s novel doesn’t connect deeply enough with the expat experience
Lost and adrift, a New York lawyer accepts a job offer in Dubai but life in the emirate is not exactly the fresh start he had been hoping for.
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