The loss that drives the book, of
course, is the loss of the three babies. Although it is only mentioned as
directly affecting the mother (and, for a short while in Olivia’s case, the
narrator), the knowledge of their loss casts a pall on the family nonetheless.
But it is not the only loss. It leads to - or at least leads to the full
expression of - the mother’s loss of sanity. And these two combined, but
particularly the latter, lead to the narrator’s loss of innocence. She is not
youthful in any part of the book, though indeed she is young. She struggles
with guilt, with life, with death, disease, suffering, poverty, drunkenness…
the list goes on. And like the rest of her family, and the rest of humanity,
she flees.
For that is the second part of the
book’s universality: flight. Whenever we are faced with guilt and pain, we
leave (if we can). And that is central to Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight:
flight. They continually move – that is the father’s flight. They continually
drink – that is the family’s flight. Vanessa involves herself in social life
(and boys’ attentions) – that is her flight. The mother flies into madness. And
the narrator, like all good writers, flies into analysis, making sense of it
all – as much as it is possible to make sense of it all, that is. Loss, guilt,
flight – these are the central themes of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,
and though their expressions might have been slightly different if the setting
wasn’t Africa, the story would still be fundamentally the same.
