‘Rover Red Charlie’ – Garth Ennis, Michael Dipascale (Avatar)

You know that feeling you get when you read an amazing book and you come away feeling like the book must have been left in the shop for you to find? Not anyone else, just you, the universe somehow knew that you’d be in the shop and left you a book that it knew you’d really enjoy. Well, that’s me and ‘Rover Red Charlie’; a book that I enjoyed so much that I’m actually going to find it difficult to read anything else for the next few days (while it works through my system). My timing is as bad as ever, I should probably have left that until the end of my post… Oh well, If you want to duck out now, that’s fine. Just make sure that you find yourself a copy of ‘Rover Red Charlie’. If you’re still here, lets see if I can explain myself a little better…

My name is Charlie and I am a dog. So are my friends Red and Rover.

Something happened to the Feeders. We don’t know what. We don’t know why. But they began to hurt each other. They hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt until none of them were left.

Now we are on our own. There’s no one left to feed us, no one to help us, no one to take us for walks. This is the Feeders’ world without the Feeders, and we don’t know how things work.

We must try to find our own way. But Rover talks funny. Red’s thinker is small. I am scared all the time. Where will we go? What will we do? How will we stay alive?

I don’t where to start with how I feel about this book (like I said, there are so many feelings to process and I am totally a dog person) so am just going to take a deep breath and dive straight in. Garth Ennis has told a tale of the apocalypse seen through the most innocent eyes you could possibly think of and the result was possibly the most compelling read I’ve had in a long time. Most humans caught in an apocalyptic situation will at least have some level of understanding around why it has happened. Rover, Red and Charlie don’t even have that. They just know that things are bad and that they can no longer rely on their Feeders to protect them, or even show them what to do. This is made really clear in the artwork, not just in what the Feeders do but also in the fact that 99.5% of their speech is literally unintelligible to dogs (they really do only understand the word ‘no’) Luckily, all dogs really need to do is eat, get rid of the waste and then sleep. The immediate needs are covered then but the real story is in watching them figure out what comes next and what they can be in a world where they are no longer owned. Charlie was trained to be a service dog and slowly comes to realise that even though he no longer has an owner, he can still help. Red isn’t the brightest of dogs but just indulges all his canine instincts and is somehow the most useful of the three. Rover… I’m not sure what to make of Rover in terms of what he brings to the group but he is definitely a good dog.

This new world then is a place where you can reinvent yourself and the real tragedy of that lies with Herman, the villain of the piece. He is brutal but still, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for him, given his background of abuse and how it informs his choices in this post-apocalyptic landscape. It all makes for a bloody good fight at the end though.

I don’t want to give too much away but those last few pages really put me through the emotional wringer. The ending though offers a real note of optimism entirely appropriate to just what good boys our heroes are. They want to do the right thing, even if they don’t know what it is yet, and there’s real hope for the future in that. Far better, I suspect, than anything we’d manage.

And I’m never much cop at talking artwork but Michael Dipascale’s art is superb; in particular the way he captures that look, on a dog’s face, when they really want to understand you… But just fall short. You know that look ;o)

‘Rover Red Charlie’ was a glorious read then. A little look online shows that the book has been around for a while so yet again, I’m probably the last person to the party. If I’m not though and you happen to come across a copy somewhere, grab it before anyone else does. It’s worth it.