A Dog Called Dez: The True Story of How One Amazing Dog Changed His Owner's Life
By: John Tovey, Veronica Clark / Narrated by: Philip Ormond
Length: 7 hrs and 39 min
Went in worried about non-Brit narrator, but dang! the story just carried the day and made this magNIficent!
I’m a total dweeb when it comes to narration: If it’s read in British English with full-bore Brit accent and Britishisms? then OBVIously it’s fraught with gravitas, yes? Uhm, okay, it’s a fault of mine, I fully concede that and am even moderately ashamed…
-However- When the story is by a British author, about the British author, then dude! Obtain a British narrator. A Dog Called Dez is just such a book, but narrator Philip Ormond is deCIDEdly NOT British. And sooo, I was a tad put off, a tad worried, knowing that in the 7 1/2 hours to come I would hear words like good lad, the boot, cuppa, a cuddle, and who knows what-all-heck else would be pronounced in American English. Uhm, hoot hoot boo!
Okay, that said, here’s another -However-
Philip Ormond has exACTly the right tones of an older and wiser man looking back upon his life with a huuuuge amount of self-awareness, accepting of his flawed choices, and accepting that his parents were so VASTLY ill-suited to the lives that they chose (Dad, an ex-military man who should NOT have ever left the order of the military, a disgustingly neglectful and abusive mother who, he sees now, was in a truly desperate clinical depression). I mean, that’s a tall order for a narrator, and Ormond is wonderful. Yeh yeh yeh, I cringed when author John Tovey says he asked for a cuppa, and it’s kinda sorta totally off when he offers his good lad a cuddle, but Ormond does so incredibly well with the oh so much all else that this story is.
It begins with the man who juuuust lost his sight at only 42-years old but then travels back to the deplorable youth he was. This is aaaaallll the story of his life, from horrible teasing/bullying/neglect morphing into the start of his lifelong habit of sucking down cigarettes starting from when he was 9-years old. His behavior changes from once wanting to fit in but then realizing he’s a total outcast and starts acting out in wild and destructive ways, to hearing about sniffing glue and then trying it —then getting totally into it— all the way to getting kicked out of his first school. Then it’s onto the next harder school with more hardened kids. Then it’s onto a locked facility where the reeeeeally hardened kids torment each other, and the repugnant guardians humiliate and sexually violate the boys. Tovey learns to be even harder, turning to the acceptance that Skinheads offer, being Loony to them and destroying all in his path.
After a stint in prison, he re-hooks up with the love of his life, wins her hand in marriage, and becomes a father to a little boy. Tovey, however, has NO zippo nada role models for how to love another person, he still drinks, his new form of fighting comes in brawls at football matches, he turns cold and distant to his wife. However much he adores her, however much he’d love to be the father he never had, he doesn’t know how, and soon he loses them both.
He’s always been a hard-drinker, but now he really throws himself into it. The Type 1 diabetes he was diagnosed with is never kept in check (Indeed, life was sooo horrifically terrible for him, he’d overdosed himself on insulin when but a teenager), and by 42, that bottle of vodka he drank on the way to the pub does his vision in, and he loses his sight. Overnight, he feels he’s lost ALL reason to live. After a rotten childhood, an adolescence he barely survived, added PTSD over the deaths of friends, THIS blindness leaves him enTIREly without a hope, without care.
A brief bout with shame over his sorry condition has him finally reaching out, and then the book is how the entry of Guide Dog Dez into his life completely and unutterably changes him. Dez is a black Labrador, a springy and vibrant dog, the instantaneous new love of his life. With Dez, he now knows what unconditional love is, how love is taken, yes, but also how it’s given in return. Soon, Dez has Tovey out and about, chatting with people at the local shops, making chums with various people on their walks. Where once Tovey found acceptance only with wilding Skinheads and criminals, now he’s hanging out with lawyers, doctors, dog-lovers from all walks of life.
What an absolute gem of a book this was. There’s no blame in here (Tho’ it might be argued that ‘twasn’t only Tovey making poor choices: He’d had MANY decks stacked against him from the get-go!), there’s only how Life can go waaaay south but can also turn on a dime and be filled with Love and Light given the right opportunities.
I often wonder (And worry, natch!) how I’d make it through something as devastating as sudden blindness (Heck! Or even gradual…), so I’m always so very grateful and thunderstruck to find individuals who actually think their new lives are grander, more full, than before. Tovey is exceedingly grateful for the about-face in life, this new awareness of senses that were dulled from drink and anger and shame beforehand. And yessss, he’s grateful to his lolling, playful, hiLARious dog Dez.
From criminal who can’t love to owning the Guide Dog of the Year, it’s truly an awesome journey that unfolds, no holds barred, in A Dog Called Dez. Can’t recommend it highly enough; got it during a sale, but gosh! experiencing it was most CERtainly Credit-Worthy!
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