The story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Fourth Estate, 2008.
ISBN 9780007265022
(Age Senior to adult). This most unusual thriller, nearly 600 pages
long, has psychic elements combined with murder, arson and dog
breeding. With touches of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the story resolves
itself in much the same way, bodies littering the pages at the end of
the novel.
Edgar Sawtelle is the third generation of a Wisconsin family which
breeds a dog now called Sawtelles. Born mute but able to hear, Edgar
was their last chance to have a child. This self contained family;
Trudy, the mother who does much of the training, and her husband Gar,
who keeps the records, and sells the dogs retaining contact with the
buyers, work with his brother Claude. Edgar learns to train with signs,
dogs having to watch him all the time, which people recognise as a
feature of these animals. The dogs are trained and kept until they are
12-18 months old before they are sold. Grandfather and father have kept
meticulous records of breeding lines, along with photographs and
information about where the dogs have gone. One dog called Almondine,
is Edgar's constant companion.
The vet is the only regular contact they have. Their lives change when
Gar dies. Edgar finds him and alone on the farm, cannot summon help.
When Edgar and Trudy try and run the place on their own, Trudy gets
pneumonia, so Claude comes to help, Edgar 's world comes to an end when
Claude and Trudy begin a relationship and Claude moves in. Edgar
decides several times that he will kill Claude and one day when he
thinks Claude is coming up the stairs in the barn he makes a move and
the vet falls to his death. Edgar runs away taking 3 of the dogs with
him.
Surviving by raiding cabins on the lakes, he comes to a farm run by
Henry; a loner who takes Edgar and the dogs in after one of the dogs is
injured. Edgar comes to believe that his father's death was not
natural, and decides he must go home. No one is there, so he leaves a
note, setting in train an amazing climax with all the characters
involved in a life and death struggle.
This story about making decisions is not your usual tale. Defying any
attempt to categorise it, the novel involves a mystery, yet tinged with
psychic moments where the future is foretold makes reading about this
family tense and unsettling. Based firmly on the relationships between
family members, the decisions people make in their lives is shown to
have far reaching ramifications. The well trained dogs seem to parallel
the decisions made by members of the family, and in the end, the
animals make the decision to leave and take charge of their own lives.
Mark Knight