THE DOGS OF WAR

Bob Wild

Paperback 6" x 9" 262 pages £9.96

 ISBN 978-1-4092-8890-9

Bob Wild was born in the 30s in Prestwich Manchester. He became a printer who later went to University where he took a doctorate in Sociology. Back in printing he became Acting Head of the Printing Department at the Metropolitan University. He taught sociology at the Open University. He finished his National Service as a sergeant in the RAMC. This gave him an encyclopaedic knowledge of body parts. Bob’s extraordinary powers of recall vivify these tales of oik life in the years of dearth. Many readers compare him to Proust. Putting down a story they usually say, with a sigh, “Well it’s not Proust is it?” But if Bob had been born in Paris sixty years earlier and had a rich dad and cultivated Jewish mother (rather than the impoverished inadequates described here) and been ten times more intelligent he might well have written a la recherche du temps perdu. He wasn’t and he didn’t but this is a close as you get in Prestwich. The style is classic oik-anecdotal and has some of the mannerisms of the great French master; the narrative suspended as we stand entranced before a butterfly or a bottle of Bovril, the catalogue of working class grotesques, the struggle for mother’s affection, the gastronomic delights of the fish and chip shop. Just as Proust’s great novel revealed treasures of cultivated sophistication to a country of philistines so Bob’s account shows modern readers a society as odd and barbaric as that of the Ituri pygmies.