I first learned about Carol Emshwiller while perusing Small Beer Press’s catalog a few years back. The idea behind her novel The Mount (a young alien and his human mount, Charley, negotiate their master/slave/friend relationship) intrigued me, and when I read it I fell in love with her quirky-but-serious writing style. A month before we left for Peru, Small Beer Press had a $1 book sale. Yes, really.

Wait. Do you not also obsess about Small Beer Press? Everything they do is awesome. Check them out.

That said, I went nuts on their sale even though I was supposed to be saving money for Peru, and I ended up with a copy of Carmen Dog that I knew would go in storage until Rob and I got back from our Indefinite Peruvian Journey.

But now we’re back. And I read Carmen Dog

(There’s one paragraph about the end–I’ve marked it with a spoiler alert. Skip it if you don’t like that sort of thing).

Here’s where I talk about the book

Carmen Dog is a shortish book, a quick read that left me both entertained and vaguely disturbed. The idea behind it is that women have begun to change into creatures and vice versa. A whole spectrum of biases against women are revealed now that the line has blurred between “wife” and “pet.” Women, having always been a frighteningly opaque species, are now even more incomprehensible as their normal feminine whims merge with the urge to fly, to swim in the sea, to climb trees, to gnaw on human flesh.

Emshwiller rarely describes her characters, only giving wildly colorful descriptions that leave everything to the imagination. The whys and hows of the women’s transformations are never fully answered: on one page the women do things that only women could do, at other times that only animals could. Emshwiller doesn’t try to direct our imaginings, she merely puts a few hints out to entice.

The main character is Pooch, a well-bred and extremely loyal dog-turned-young-woman. She teeters on the edge of her new-found humanity: she enjoys the new responsibilities, artistic leanings and the elegant new hands which are a part of her new transformation, but she’s also been thrust into a world of malicious intention and conflicted feelings.

Pooch is loyal, as a dog should be. Her self-worth is found almost entirely in the eyes of the men she desires to serve well and unselfishly, to the detriment of her own aspirations. In a dog, this is admirable. In a young woman, Pooch’s slavish desire to prove herself to her master is extremely uncomfortable to read about. Emshwiller plays with this tension: after hearing that the master will come for her at the pound, Pooch reels:

But if she apologizes profusely enough and promises to work much harder, to get up very early, eat less, and not take even one little moment for herself or even one little penny ever again for such frivolities as flowers [...], perhaps in this way she can make it up to him or do penance of some sort. “Anything,” she will say to him, “I’ll do absolutely anything: lick your feet, walk one step behind your left heel…just let me stay and serve you and let me see the baby now and then if only from a distance [...].” She hopes that after she says all this and makes the promises, he’ll see that she’s worth keeping–a thought not uncommon to many creatures of her sex. (p. 16.)

Carmen Dog is a brutal critique of the dynamic of relationships between men and women, but Emshwiller doesn’t come across as having an agenda–she’s just created a strange little “what if?” world, then taken it and ran.

Pooch is the only female voice in the novel. Emshwiller gives us the perspective of the Master, of the Doctor, of the worried men at the Academy of Motherhood who try to find a way to rear children without the tainted influence of unstable women. The men, it turns out, are nearly all assholes. Women have become property, a thing to be controlled, and beneath Emshwiller’s lovely prose runs an unsettling current of sexual dominance and manipulation.

It was almost as though the men had at last found a world to their liking, in which they had even more control than before and in which relationships and responsibilities were less confining. After all, they merely involved dumb animals who were not worth consideration, politeness, time, effort, gifts. [...] To be fair, however, one must admit that a small percentage of the men are trying to help out as best they can, both in bringing reason to chaos and also in bringing a little happiness or, at the very least, some small comforts, to everyone’s lives–whether human or animal or half and half–inasmuch as such a thing may be possible. (p. 32.)

Upon fleeing her master’s house to protect the baby from its mother (who is rapidly becoming a snapping turtle), Pooch is thrown into a women-only pound where the female creatures are abused and, in one instance, sexually assaulted. She is then transferred to a basement research facility where the Doctor performs cruel experiments on the women. After losing her beautiful operatic singing voice as a result of his torture, Pooch escapes with the baby and navigates the streets of New York, penniless and defenseless. Eventually the women and their allies form a resistance to fight their marginalization.

[Spoiler alert] In the end, however, there’s a happily-ever-after moment that rings false. Pooch ends up with her dream man, who seems like a very nice sort (yay!), but that is presented in a “happy epilogue” with two other matches that left a sour taste in my mouth. Two of the main sadistic male characters we meet–the Doctor and the Opera Producer–have repeatedly expressed interest (obsession? love, we’re told) in two of Pooch’s friends. Since we never get inside the heads of Pooch’s friends, it’s hard to know whether Chloe (an ex-siamese) really wants to marry the Opera Producer after weeks of sexual slavery to him, or whether Phillip (an ex-kingsnake who turned out to be female) really wants to marry the Doctor after he tortured her. Emshwiller presents their unions as tidy “of course it ended that way” moments, without any of the biting commentary and analysis that she used throughout the rest of the book.

In the end, however, I loved Carmen Dog. If you haven’t read it, I heartily recommend it to you.