“Two hours, twenty minutes, fifty-three and two-fifths seconds,” the good doctor says clinically after Rowf has foundered yet again. Rowf, for example, is nearly drowned day after day in a water tank, forced to swim for his life until exhaustion sinks him. But sometimes it’s simply the acquisition of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Boycott, makes clear that the purpose of the experiments is usually commercial. All manner of animals, from monkeys to mice, cats to rabbits, are abused at A.R.S.E. There is brutality aplenty here, most notably in the beginning, before Snitter and Rowf escape. He often finds himself thinking that such suffering “for” men is his true purpose in life, but has vowed to die before being returned to the horrors of the lab. He has known only torture and he trusts no human.
Rowf, a shaggy black mutt, has no such illusions. Snitter, a black-and-white terrier, was sold to the lab by the nasty sister of his former master, who was in a terrible car accident he has memories of “good” men and gentle touches.
is a tipoff that Adams isn’t going for subtlety - is a moral stain, a leprous monument to cruelty ironically situated in the breathtakingly beautiful Lake Country of northern England. The Animal Research, Surgical and Experimental - the acronym A.R.S.E. This is the tragic story of Rowf and his friend Snitter, two dogs who have been brutalized in an all-purpose English animal-research facility, their escape, and their harrowing efforts to stay alive. Indeed it is, and Adams leaves no doubt in readers’ minds in his hard-edged, polemical third novel, the spiritual cousin to his first, the world-wide bestseller “Watership Down.” “It’s a hard world for animals,” says Rowf, one of the two canine narrators in Richard Adams’ 1977 novel “The Plague Dogs.” The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams. Note: The Backlist is a series of occasional reviews of worthy books published in years past.
0 kommentar(er)
