A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World – C.A. Fletcher

My name’s Griz. My childhood wasn’t like yours. I’ve never had friends, and in my whole life I’ve not met enough people to play a game of football.

My parents told me how crowded the world used to be, but we were never lonely on our remote island. We had each other, and our dogs.

Then the thief came.

There may be no law left except what you make of it. But if you steal my dog, you can at least expect me to come after you.

Because if we aren’t loyal to the things we love, what’s the point?

Review

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World is probably one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year. It’s interesting in a lot of different ways. It is a post apocalyptic tale that feels so realistic it sometimes feels as a real, frightening glimpse into our future. It’s interesting because of the format and the way the story is told. It’s interesting because of the set-up of the world and what that means for the interactions between characters. I wasn’t too sure if I really liked it until about the halfway point. That’s where I really started enjoying the book.

At first the format of the book threw me a little bit. It takes some getting used to as it doesn’t follow the conventional rules of fantasy book storytelling. For me, in the beginning, it was sometimes hard to figure out when someone is speaking. The story is told from the perspective of Griz. Basically, what we’re reading are the notebook scribbles of someone trying to pen down their story. The way the book was formatted therefore makes sense because it strengthens the diary-type of storytelling, I just really needed some extra time to get used to it. This made the first part of the book quite slow for me and it didn’t manage to draw me in. This changes around the halfway point when Griz meets someone called John Dark. From that point onwards I was heavily invested in the story and its outcome.

Griz tells his story to a person in a photograph. It’s a photograph he found during one of their ‘Viking’ trips, venturing out to abandoned houses to look for supplies. Griz addresses the person in the picture, but because it‘s us reading the story, it feels like it’s told to us, like we’re the person in the picture. It makes it all feel very personal. Griz lives on an island off the coast of what used to be the Scotland with his parents, brother and sister. They also have two dogs, Jip and Jess. 

They live in our future. In that future the population has been decimated by fertility problems. Only a few thousand are still alive on the planet and they live far apart in the ruins of our modern day world. Because there are so few people and everyone lives so far apart,  any interactions between humans is both very scary and very precious. I think the author did a great job of getting that point across as I couldn’t help but feel suspicious but also hopeful whenever Griz would encounter someone new. One day they receive a visitor on the island who has come by to trade. His intentions are however less than honourable and early the next morning he flees, having stolen their food and one of the dogs. Griz can’t let him get away with their dog, so he decides to pursue the thief and get their dog back. 

Someone on Instagram asked me if this is a homage to A Boy and His Dog by Harlan Ellison. I was at that point not familiar with the book, but after doing some research the novel by C.J. Fletcher must be a nod to Ellison’s work. It touches on similar themes, though from what I can tell are still completely different stories. It seems to me that Fletcher’s book has followed the path of realism a lot more than Ellison’s. 

The story has a few twists towards the end that throw the whole book into a new light. It works the book towards a satisfying wrap-up leaving a few things open to the interpretation of the reader. After finishing I realised that I had grown rather fond of Griz and the dogs. Even though I struggled a bit through the first half of the book, the second half more than made up for it. 

Release Date: April 23rd, 2019
Publisher: Orbit
Age Group: Adult
Pages: 365
Format: Hardcover
Source: Received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review