Last week I finished the Maf the Dog book, or to give it the full title: The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe, which was another book I got through Amazon’s Vine programme.   I actually got it last year, at which time there was a bit of a buzz about it and I thought it was going to be one of those runaway cult bestsellers like The Life of Pi, but I don’t think that happened.

This is what I said about it:

The premise of this book is that it is written by a dog which is given to Marilyn Monroe as a gift by Frank Sinatra.  As such it should appeal to somebody wanting a glimpse at the Hollywood scene of the early 60s from a totally different perspective, but anybody looking for that is going to find something a bit tougher to chew on.

Personally I am not an avid student of that time so I don’t know how much of the story is known facts, how much is little-known facts, how much is based on fact and how much is pure invention.  I’m not especially bothered but I suspect that somebody who does know more about that time, perhaps who was around at the time, would enjoy the references and speculations more.

What you won’t get is cuteness, because the dog telling the story is a keen student of literature, philosophy and classical history with a special subject of dogs in literature and history.  Assuming all the references to famous dogs are correct and well-researched, and I am assuming that, there are a lot more dogs in fiction than I had known about.

The book is well-written, beautifully-written even, but perhaps over-written in places, which follows from the fundamental conceit that dogs tend to be experts in prose – cats preferring poetry and other animals like spiders or squirrels appearing more normal.

Of course, you have to go along with the central fantasy that the animals can absorb all that knowledge about books without physically being able to read them and that all animals can understand each other’s speech even though humans can’t, which gets harder when the average animal in the book has a wider range of knowledge than even the most educated people in it do, but if you get hung up on the logic I don’t think you will get very far.

One interesting thing, for me anyway, was to see how large Trotsky and Freud loomed in the consciousness of the chattering classes, at least as portrayed here.

I expected to enjoy the book more, and wanted to enjoy it more, but in the end I liked it rather than loved it.