Book review: The Starlight Barking by Dodie Smith

The Hundred and One Dalmatians is the source novel behind the classic Disney film One Hundred and One Dalmatians and is even more delightful. I read the book years ago, and so has Faith, more recently.  When we were at the used book store recently, we found this sequel of which I had been entirely unaware on the shelves.  It was clearly a reprint churned out in the wake of the live-action movie, but it was by Dodie Smith and written years before Glenn Close donned Cruella's furs so we bought it.  After Faith read it, it became the thirty-first book I read in 2015.

In general, a long gap between an original work and its sequel rarely bodes well for the later installments, and the eleven-year gap between The Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking is no exception.  The original book is a mundane tale; it has fantastical elements, yes, but the largest of these is the conceit that animals communicate with one another and take matters into their own paws when the humans are stymied.  The second one goes full-on sci-fi/fantasy.  If you ever thought the Dalmatians would be more endearing if they could control traffic lights and elevators by telepathy and propel themselves and vehicles through the air at high speeds through levitation, well, this is your book.  The long struggle to get the puppies from Suffolk to London on foot through the snow, with the assistance of dogs and other animals along the way, provided much of the charm of the first book; to have Pongo, Missis, and the rest of the family effortlessly pilot themselves over the same route in a few hours rather takes away from the achievement.

The culprit, as so often was the case in the 1960s, was the Cold War.  Smith clearly meant for this to be a Thought-Provoking book, condemning human society on account of the nuclear arms race. Imagine The Day the Earth Stood Still with an all-dog cast.  Oh, and there's an entirely pointless digression about Cruella designing a new fashion line of clothing made entirely of metal called Kloes that Klank.

My advice is, treasure the original and pretend the sequel never happened.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I must report that Faith liked the book.  She liked the "swooshing," the dogs' term for their method of kinetic self-propelling, and wished she could learn to do it herself.)