Overview
The Hunters are your typical family, with typical concerns—work, money, love, the trials of adolescence—with one difference: they are protected by a highly atypical dog, their black Labrador, Prince. Prince views it as his sacred duty to protect his family and guard its integrity. But what is he to do when the family's worst enemies are themselves?
Wry, perceptive and heartbreaking, The Labrador Pact is a cunning and original take on domestic life in all its joy and disillusionment. Matt Haig has created an improbably poignant narrator in Prince, offering a truly unique perspective on the foibles of family relationships. As Prince uses his heart and soul (and wags and barks) to keep the Hunter clan together, he finds himself confounded by the odd behavior of the humans he loves. To save his family, Prince must betray the ancient Pact of the Labradors—a decision that may cost him everything.
Synopsis
The story of a family in crisis and the loyal dog that holds them together, from the witty, imaginative author of The Dead Fathers Club.
The Hunters—Adam, Kate, and their children Hal and Charlotte—are a typical family, with typical concerns: work, money, love, the trials of adolescence. What sets them apart is Prince, their black labrador.
Prince is an earnest and determined young dog. He strives to live up to the tenets of the Labrador Pact: Duty Over All. Other dogs, led by the springer spaniels, have revolted, but Prince takes his responsibilities seriously. As things in the Hunter family begin to go awry—marital breakdown, rowdy teenage parties, attempted suicide—he uses every canine resource to keep the clan together.
In the end, Prince must choose: the family or the Pact? His decision may cost him everything.
Wry, perceptive, and heartbreaking, The Labrador Pact is a cunning and original take on domestic life, with an improbably poignant narrator.
The Barnes & Noble Review
All roads lead to Shakespeare for Matt Haig, which turns out to be a good thing. There s no one quite like the Bard for barging head-first into a tale of death, desperation, and betrayal, and wringing out some laughs along the way. No flinching, no sentimental sap, no turning back.
That s how Haig played it in his weird and wonderful debut novel, The Dead Father s Club, a modern re-working of Hamlet, and that s how he hands us The Labrador Pact, an offbeat look at domestic life through the eyes -- and voice -- of the family dog.
Editorials
Alison McCulloch
Dark, comic and quite brilliantly adult, Haig's thinking animals never stray into the sickly sweet zone.—The New York Times
Molly Gloss
Haig's book steers far north of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, if not quite into the epic neighborhood of Animal Farm and Watership Down. The animal perspective is fully adult—a puckish slant on the disillusionments of modern domestic life…As Haig pushes beyond the usually somber boundaries of Urban Dysfunctional Fiction, maybe we should just enjoy his novel for what it is: a wry, serio-comic family tail, er, tale, for our serio-comic times.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Award-winning narrator Simon Jones does not rest on his hind legs, as Prince, the black Lab who narrates this novel, might put it. Prince has a lot to say, and though Jones is generally even-toned and thoughtful, he can make Prince sound confused, excited, panicky, sad and remorseful. In addition to Prince, Jones takes on a large cast of humans, canines and one feline. Falstaff, a springer mix, is so hyper that Jones makes listeners imagine the mutt bouncing up and down. Prince's master, Adam, comes across as a shaky voice of reason who attempts to cover up his insecurities and desires. Emily, an aroma therapist and Adam's illicit love interest, sounds girlish and a bit dizzy. The novel is more kibble than meat; however, Jones's brilliant performance will have listeners howling with glee and begging for more. Simultaneous release with the Viking hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 19, 2007). (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Kirkus Reviews
A faithful family friend gives his all for "his" human family in this modern beast fable, another revisionist romp from the British author of The Dead Fathers Club (2007). This one, originally published in the UK in 2004 as The Last Family in England, is narrated by Prince, a handsome Labrador dog, who "speaks" with other nonhuman creatures and communicates with humans by means of therapeutic tail-wagging and crotch-sniffing, and well-timed warning barks. We first meet Prince in the veterinarian's office. Schoolteacher Adam Hunter has taken the beloved pooch to be put down-for reasons then explained in a book-length flashback. Prince admits he has violated the eponymous Pact adhered to by all Labradors, "the only dogs left who were willing to devote our lives to the protection of our masters." As Prince explains (during walks in the park) to his "mentor" Henry, a sagacious retired police dog, the Hunters are a pawful. The aforementioned Adam is, in full midlife-crisis mode, under the spell of bewitching young aromatherapist Emily. Adam's spouse Kate is puzzlingly unsettled by their re-acquaintance with Emily's shark-like husband Simon, Adam's former pal, who also, it appears, has a history with Kate. And the Hunters' teenagers, Hal and Charlotte, are . . . well, teenagers. Inflamed emotions and miscellaneous misbehavior intensify, and corpses of multiple species begin piling up, as Prince struggles to avert the worst, inspired by the Pact's dictum: "If one human Family is secure and happy, it means there is security and happiness beyond." The novel works because its central conceit, and Prince, are real charmers. But the narrative is skimpy and redundant, perilously cute and clogged withanticipations of Haig's Shakespeare-inflected The Dead Fathers Club (besides Prince, there are fellow mutts Falstaff and Lear). By no means a failure, but Aesop and Orwell did it better. Agent: Caradoc King/AP WattDaily Mail
Clearly destined to become a cult hit. I only wish my dog had thought of it first. - Daily MailInk Magazine
Highly engrossing, hilarious yet heart-breaking. - Ink MagazineThe Times (London)
A comic tour de force. - The Times of LondonFrom the Publisher
Clearly destined to become a cult hit. I only wish my dog had thought of it first.
—Daily Mail
[Narrator] Jone's brilliant performance will have listeners howling with glee and begging for more.
—Publishers Weekly
A comic tour de force.
—The Times of London
The Barnes & Noble Review
All roads lead to Shakespeare for Matt Haig, which turns out to be a good thing. There's no one quite like the Bard for barging head-first into a tale of death, desperation, and betrayal, and wringing out some laughs along the way. No flinching, no sentimental sap, no turning back.That's how Haig played it in his weird and wonderful debut novel, The Dead Father's Club, a modern re-working of Hamlet, and that's how he hands us The Labrador Pact, an offbeat look at domestic life through the eyes -- and voice -- of the family dog.
The dog in this case is Prince, a Labrador rescued some years back by the Hunter family, a perfect-on-the-outside unit of two parents, a son, and a daughter. The truth, as we soon learn, is that Prince actually rescued the Hunters. He saw them from the behind the bars of his cage at the pound and decided they would be his: "So instead of chewing my testicles abstractedly, as I had when every other sorry prospect walked past, I sat up and made an effort. The perfect dog for the perfect Family," Prince tells us.
Ensconced in his suburban paradise, Prince soon meets his mentor, a yellow lab named Henry. Henry teaches Prince all about the ancient Labrador Pact, an ethos whose many edicts boil down to "Duty Over All." That duty is to protect the family unit at all costs: "We are the last dogs to understand the need for duty over all," the pact states. "We are the last to realize that human Families hold the key to our future survival."
Henry also explains the finer points of the Springer Uprising, a rebellion in which pleasure-seeking spaniels have undermined the canine devotion to duty that keeps the human world from flying apart. With lessons like Advanced Wag Control (the key to sustained family happiness) and Sensory Predictive Awareness (how to smell trouble before it happens), Henry hands Prince the keys to his kingdom.
Which is as good a time as any to talk about Henry IV, Part One, the Shakespearean history play upon whose warp and woof (sorry) Haig's odd novel is laid out. In the play, Prince Hal wavers between his filial duty as the future king of England and the pleasure-soaked world of his pal Sir John Falstaff. Prince-the-dog knows full well his duty to his family, but he has a Falstaff of his own -- that's the name of the springer spaniel mix across the park -- who does his best to lead the Lab astray.
Here's Prince, under the influence after a bit of (forbidden for Labs) pleasure-sniffing: "As I inhaled, a wild and heady cocktail of smells hit me. Rich earth, leaf juice, worm blood, squirrel droppings. I recognized each smell, but had never experienced them with such intensity. Time stopped, or shifted sideways. My whole body dissolved into the air. I couldn't feel my paws."
Overlaid on the Shakespearean tale is the human story of the Hunters. Adam and Kate (yes, more Shakespearean echoes) have two kids, a mortgage, a shaky marriage, and more than a few secrets between them. For no reason we can discern, they haven't had sex in years.
Prince, whose sense of smell tells him what people are feeling, knows great danger has arrived when a new couple moves into the big house across the park. Simon, an old acquaintance, still has a thing for Kate. His young and sexy wife, Emily, makes it her job to seduce Adam. Prince finds himself caught in the middle, knowing all (thanks to that remarkable doggy nose) but able to do little.
The adults go astray, the kids misbehave, and Prince soon finds betrayal all around him. The people he is sworn to protect do stupid and destructive things, and wag though he might, Prince can't save them. The dogs he lives among -- Labs and springers both -- turn out to be not much better.
You can't help hearing the chilly echoes of Orwell's Animal Farm, though instead of the oppressions of Soviet totalitarianism, the subject here is the danger of the modern family. And then there's Lear, a Rottweiler whose speech is so peppered with f-bombs that not even a fragment of Haig's hilarious summation of Shakespeare's great play is left to quote.
Though there's plenty of plot to go around, The Labrador Pact feels strangely lean. Maybe it's the short, short chapters, which range from four words ("There was a sound") to several pages. Or it could be that Haig is being true to Prince's worldview, limited as it is to what his nose can tell him. --Veronique de Turenne
Veronique de Turenne is a Los Angelesbased journalist, essayist and playwright. Her literary criticism appears on NPR and in major American newspapers. One of the highlights of her career was interviewing Vin Scully in his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, then receiving a hand-written thank you note from him a few days later.