110 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
Before joining Bev Shaw’s animal refuge, Lurie’s attitude to such
volunteer work is dismissive and cynical; he informs Lucy that
“animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind.
Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you
itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat”
(p. 73). However, motivated by a tacit request from his daughter, he
volunteers at the refuge and gradually begins to bond with the aban-
doned animals. These bonds come to take on more substance after
the ordeal of Lucy’s assault, with Lurie appearing to use his relation-
ships with the dogs as an emotional outlet to aid his psychological
recovery. The most significant of these develops with “a young male
with a withered left hindquarter which it drags behind it,” who,
being abandoned and unwanted, strikes an immediate chord with
Lurie (p. 215). In the novel’s last scenes, he takes the animal out of its
kennel to be euthanized and becomes “sensible of a generous affec-
tion streaming out toward him from the dog” (p. 215). For Adriaan
van Heerden, it is such displays of “unconditional love and friend-
ship [... that make the dog] a model for human behaviour,” helping
Lurie to appreciate “what it means to be a good human being.”^58
Perhaps the determining element in the conciliatory characteristics
van Heerden describes, and which Coetzee draws our attention to, is
that the dogs lack the capacit y for reciprocal intellectual or linguistic
exchange.
By forming bonds that are built entirely on the grounds of emo-
tional attachment and identification, Lurie opens himself up to new
modes of being and appreciating life. Indeed, in some moments,
he exhibits a degree of care and ease with the dogs that he does not
visibly extend to humans. Comforting the sick, abandoned, female
dog, Katy, for example, Lurie “squats down, tickles her behind the
ears. ‘Abandoned, are we?’ he murmurs. He stretches out beside her
on the bare concrete. Above is the pale blue sky. His limbs relax”
(p. 78). The animals have such an emotional effect on Lurie, that,
driving home after an especially difficult day at the refuge, “he actu-
ally has to stop at the roadside to recover himself. Tears flow down
his face that he cannot stop; his hands shake” (p. 143). Bound up
in this reaction is of course the unresolved emotional trauma over
Lucy’s rape; but the fact that Lurie is only able to find an outlet for