A bone to chew

Being a dog fan, The dog allusion: gods, pets and how to be human, by Martin Rowson, bounded straight off the cataloguing shelf at me.

You will find it in the library under the Dewey number for the humorous treatment of religion. Although the author is also a political cartoonist, don’t search here for the perfect, dog-themed sermon illustration. However, if you are looking for something provocative, thought-provoking, topical and irreverently funny, then maybe this book is for you.

The dog/god, religion/pet-owning comparisons are here, but it’s the nature of human beings that is really under the caricaturist’s spotlight (or should that be ‘floodlight’). Be warned, this self-professed atheist’s ‘rant’ is punctuated by rambling footnotes and helpful appendices such as a list of international animal noises, grouped by language. In his arguments - for example, that religion is really just a subset of politics - Rowson the satirist does not hesitate to take swipes at many, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Richard Dawkins.

To give you a taste, here is a snapshot of human inconsistency, which is by coincidence taken from what may be the longest sentence in the book: “[I]f your political bent is not totalitarian, or you’re not blinded by Manicheanism or substitute racism…you should have no problem whatsoever in sympathising, or maybe even empathising, with poor and beleaguered Muslims and their families while still deploring the narrowness and short-sightedness of their self-selected spokesmen, while simultaneously supporting the efforts of Muslims in Muslim countries using whatever methods they can to free themselves of the corrupt and incompetent despots who rule them, even if you deplore the wider implications of the political Islamism they resort to, while at exactly the same time utterly deploring the crass interventions of Western powers to bolster those despots, but also actively supporting, advocating and defending the Western way of life to the death”. Yes, there are some big mouthfuls in this bite-sized book!

Liz Tisdall