Format: Paperback
Published by: Penguin
Pages: 243
ISBN: 9780141327174
Price: 350 INR

‘A wild, wise, cartwheeling explanation of life, the universe and everything. Given the glorious, eccentric, spectacular cock-up that is Planet Earth, the Creator can only have been a slack, male adolescent with a short attention span and an unruly sex organ. I don’t know why no one has worked this out before. It makes a whole lot more sense than particle physics. And, unlike Big Bang Theory, it’s funny.’

– MAL PEET.

ThereIsNoDogIf the concept of God existing is something that may be unimaginable to the teeming atheists around the world, portraying God as an unruly, horny fifteen year old teenager is something very daring. Meg Rosoff manages to do that and much more with her charm of a novel ‘There Is No Dog’. Released in the summer of 2011, this is a novel that has knocked every off their socks with its never-thought-before idea. It’s as simple as this: God’s real name is Bob and he’s your typical teenage boy. It was he who created this mess of a world in merely six days. Unfortunately bestowed with qualities like laziness, carelessness and being self-obsessed, this sex-mad boy has very few worries on his mind. It’s not something you want an ideal God to be, to say the least.

With a glorious foreword by Stephen King (By God, is it really him?), the novel begins in a sing-song manner. It’s something that suggests the glorious God himself is about to fall in love. Disasters have occurred before when that has happened time and over, so God…Bob’s personal assistant who goes by the name of Mr. B has to save the day each time. Cleaning after him and his idiot aspirations. Shown to be the brain and conscience of Bob, he has to, at the same time, take care of Bob and make sure his antics don’t land his favorite creations – the Blue Whales- into any kind of trouble. Mr. B is shown in the story as the kind of person who delights his day in routine- for him, every day begins the same way. Normandy butter, raspberry jam, two poached eggs, strong coffee. It’s all set for him- he simply cannot imagine beginning a day without all of this.

Bob chances upon Lucy’s plea of falling in love, at a time when Mr. B is sorting the multitude of pleas out. Being the way he is, he singles her out and lands on planet Earth. Attempts to impress her work on first sight, him being God and all. For the rest of the conversation, one’d rather call him Bob and see how disastrously close he comes to destroying his life and the planet over a girl. Not something we have seen or read before, have we now? Be as that may, as one reads on, there are hidden gems inside a few sentences here and there in the book. The fact that the world is not full of suffering- it is full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. Just for the hell of it. That there are flashes of brilliance, bouts of strange energy hidden among each and every person we encounter. And that, in the end, it all comes to a more or less satisfying conclusion.

Just like life.

Rating: 7.5/ 10

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