The Dogs of Babel
By Carolyn Parkhurst 

     If you loved Watership Down or author Richard Adams’ eerie ghostly love story Girl in a Swing, you’ll find this tale a worthy successor.

     Linguist Paul Iverson grapples with the death of his beloved but secretive wife, Lexy Ransome, who fears getting pregnant and emerges as a mysterious complex woman akin to Adams’ heroine Kathé, literally haunted by the child she killed. But Lexy and Paul’s relationship is less a ghost story, or even the story of a boy and his dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Lorelei, than a grieving husband’s attempt to understand his wife and cope with her possible suicide. Survivors of suicides may identify with Paul’s extreme behavior, trying to teach Lorelei to speak and tell him that Lexy didn’t kill herself.

     The experiments with Lorelei (a guide, like all dogs in fiction) test Paul’s, his colleagues’, and the reader’s patience (hasn’t animal-human communication advanced beyond this?), and the subplot of Paul getting entangled with a Son of Sam/Dr. Frankenstein/Poe-esque/Kafkaesque madman who tries to teach dogs to talk by mutilating their throats (PETA, where are you?) runs the risk of losing reader sympathy for Paul, who nearly bargains his soul away to the devil in his futile search for answers that, amazingly, he comes to on his own, by understanding his wife for who she was. Paul’s saving grace is that he does deeply love Lexy, and anyone who has lost someone they love can identify with his desperation and denial, if not his methods.

     It is the love story, not the high-concept “the dog knows the answer” angle that holds our attention. Lexy and Paul’s unconventional love finds a perfect symbol in the square eggs Paul impulsively makes for Lexy at their first meeting. Parkhurst then takes a cue from the pilot of the hit television show “Dharma & Greg” when Lexy and Paul go to Disney World for a weeklong date. Such a whirlwind courtship indicates Lexy’s emotional turmoil, and one wonders just what she was running from and why, but in the end, the strength, forgiveness and purity of Paul’s love makes us mourn Lexy too.