Output details

The life and opinions of Maf the dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe

The work on this novel took four years and began while researching the auction house Christie's in New York. The sale of Marilyn Monroe's personal belongings revealed something of the life of a small Maltese terrier, Mafia Honey, given to her by Frank Sinatra. I decided to write a picaresque novel in the dog's voice, set in the years 1960-1962. This involved research on a number of fronts. The first was the comic picaresque itself: I studied Henry Fielding, and the history of that form from Cervantes through Stern's Tristram Shandy to Virginia Woolf's Flush and Kerouac's On the Road. My second year was spent unearthing the history of talking animals in literature, from the classical debate about the consciousness and 'speech' of animals, to a host of international examples, concentrating mainly on Scottish tradition, which begins with Robert Burn's 'The Twa Dogs' and 'Robert Fergusson's 'The Sow of Feeling'. I looked at talking animals in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and in the 'thinking' of animals, such as one sees in Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Travels With a Donkey' and in Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary'. My own narrator, Maf, becomes an expert in this area, which enhanced the book's force as a comic literary work.

The next area was the film and cultural world of early 60s California, New York, and Britain. This involved a period spent in Los Angeles studying local architecture, 20th Century Fox film studios, and the contemporary intellectual climate in New York. Everyone who appears in the novel is or was a real person and I had to read every memoir and study every piece of literary and cinematic evidence to place them correctly into the narrative. The book was a labour of love and was respected internationally on publication as a contemporary inflection of several strong literary traditions.