Angus

A memoir told telepathically by a dying Jack Russell terrier named Angus who's owned by author Siebert (Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral, 1997) and his wife Bex, known herein as Huge-Head and Sweet-Voice, a questionable device when Angus the terrier knows many place names as well as the names of people he's never met.
But one willingly suspends disbelief and allows Siebert all the latitude he needs to get his story underway. This tale, however, lies in the consciousness of an 11-month-old dog, making less for a great plot than for a series of episodes whose interest resides not in the action but rather in Siebert's powers of recording Angus's synesthetic sensation-thought-feelings. And the devilishly stubborn and willful Angus is a fabulously gifted telepathist who, with Siebert's help, writes better than most of his listener-readers. The power of scent in a terrier has seldom been as strongly captured, though Siebert's skill at this falls slightly short of Tolstoy's affective power to enter animals' minds (see "Strider: The Story of a Horse"), a comparison Siebert probably can live with. In England, Angus was taken from his mother at ten weeks by Huge-Head and Sweet-Voice, whose dog Lucy was deep into her last days. Quite amusing is Angus's trip to Canada by a plane also carrying a rhino, horses, two emus, and a parrot. Unfortunately, his reckless character has him rushing out into the woods each evening, following scents, and when at times he doesn't return, being sought by his owners. One night in the woods he's attacked by a mysterious animal (a mother coyote protecting her pups). He tells us his adventures during his months in Canada while trying to drag himself back home, unable to answer the voices calling for him.
Most dog-lovers (and many others) will be moved by Angus's stories and adore being drowned in his sensibilities, which Siebert invests with many powerful lyric moments indeed.