The Plague Dogs

The Plague Dogs is the Richard Adams novel that should be more widely read than it is. Two dogs, Snitter (a Border Collie with a brain that has been surgically interfered with) and Rowf (a black mongrel who has been drowned and resuscitated repeatedly in survival experiments), escape from a Lakeland animal research station. They survive in the fells. The press picks up the story. The country panics about plague.

Adams writes the dogs from inside their consciousness in a way that is much closer to Watership Down than to anything else I can think of, with a similar lyrical precision about a specific landscape (the Cumbrian fells, in this case) and a similar willingness to take animal interior life seriously. Snitter's damaged mind in particular is rendered with extraordinary care.

The book is also a piece of polemical writing. Adams was openly campaigning against vivisection, and the novel does not soften its position. The chapters in the research station are difficult and meant to be. The closing pages, when the dogs and a mysterious figure on the fells finally arrive at the sea, broke me at 12 and still break me now.

Five stars. Read with both hands. A genuinely important book about the cost of certain kinds of science and a sustained piece of art in its own right.