Readers who venture beyond the jacket and into the prologue of Richard Gwyn's debut novel are rewarded in short order with an intriguing explanation of the abstruse title: 'In the language here this idiom refers to something of an indeterminate or vague and shadowy appearance, perhaps suggesting a fugitive reality.'� These are the words of a self-imposed hermit, a narrator who oversees a remote prison tower of which he is neither prisoner nor guard. He proposes to tell the reader about a period of his past life, but warns that in the act of creation, these moments have become disjunctive and mutable. He faces the dilemma of rendering a reality that he can intuit, but which is also hidden from him. The story that follows is part romantic thriller, part historical gloss; but most importantly it is also a critical investigation into the nature of stories themselves.

Lucas enjoys a passive, desultory existence in Barcelona's vibrant and seedy Gothic Quarter until his life is ruptured by the delivery of an enigmatic postcard bearing a mysterious invitation. He meets a young, troubled woman called Nuria and they begin a passionate love affair, which for Lucas's part becomes increasingly obsessive as he realises his role in the story is being scripted by some outside force. After a seemingly chance meeting with Barcelona's mythical 'roof people' he and Nuria are abducted by a sect of medieval revivalists, intent on establishing the continuity of a group of fugitive Cathar heretics from the thirteenth century. They are lead by the charismatic Pontneuf who believes Lucas is the reincarnation of one of the fugitive leaders, and who also has an undisclosed but powerful hold over Nuria. Lucas escapes, and returns to Barcelona alone to wander drunk amidst the fire-eaters and prostitutes, recounting his strange story to his by turns worried and disbelieving friends.

The Colour of a Dog Running Away could conceivably be read as a straight romantic thriller. It's got all the elements: a narrator caught up in a series of romantic and quasi-criminal entanglements that he barely understands; a bizarre array of characters - fire eaters, barons in green suits, roof people - who each pitch up in time to deliver the next revelation; even the opportunity to defeat the bad guy (Pontneuf) and get the girl. Yet Gwyn is at pains to destabilise this reading at every turn. When relating the details of his imprisonment by the mysterious Cathar sect, Lucas is pulled up by his friend Sean Hogg for trying out different literary styles - ''A dungeon, filled with slimy crawling things?, Asked Sean, incredulous. 'Narration slips seamlessly from gothic fantasy to The Count of Monte Cristo.''� Is Lucas leading us all up the garden path?

In fact Lucas himself regularly flaunts his own unreliability. Throughout the middle section of the book, where he relates all the juicy bits regarding lunatic Cathar priests and burnings at the stake, he develops the worrying tendency of referring to himself in the third person; directly after informing the reader that he is about to 'eject himself from the story.' At one point he even hints that this is all just material for a book: 'So when do we get to find out, Lucas? The ending.' Lucas replies, 'Lucas is working on it.'�

Such self-conscious authorial shenanigans might be seen as distracting in what stands as a quietly beautiful novel. But, maybe we're just too used to tidy plot-led novels these days and don't have the time for ontological speculation. The fact remains that Gwyn is able to field his ambiguities and marginal characters (replete with suggestive Kierkegaard reading kidnappers, fire-breathing fortune-tellers) in such a way that every line becomes sensitised with possibilities, making the novel an intriguing, rewarding read in and of itself.

In this sense it is Gwyn's ability to convey the richness of his subject - ultimately the city of Barcelona - with such elegant, understated prose, that gives the novel much of its strength. With a wide-angle lens his Barcelona is phantasmagorical, like one of Calvino's Invisible cities: 'There was an edge of muted excitement in the air. Barcelona often seemed like that: a city on the brink, infatuated with its own improbability.'� It's polymorphous nature is celebrated as 'a capital for human marginalia ... Catalans, anarchists, and queers.'� Yet at the same time Gwyn can focus on the immediate and discrete in order to evoke a sense of the city's being, almost as though finding its pulse: 'I watched a lizard scuttle along the veranda wall. A city lizard on a dizzy city parapet. It stopped and blinked at me, watching and not watching.'� With such tender description for a thing loved, Gwyn's status as a celebrated poet is unsurprising.

So, is The Colour of a Dog Running Away a Swiftian hoax? Or maybe a satire on the recent spate of cod-religious historical thrillers? Perhaps on a deeper level Gwyn's formal strategy and use of language might be connected. Lucas's refusal to become 'written-into' Pontneuf's own wacky story may in many ways be seen as an allegory of a writer's struggle to purge his story of grand narratives in order to pursue a 'truer' representation of the world. (Significantly, it is only after surviving his own nihilistic self-destruction that Lucas can begin to set down his story). After all, if we reject an outside, governing function that permits meanings to be fixed, then all we are left with is the material world and our opaque infatuation with it. The colour of a dog running away.

The Colour of a Dog Running Away
by Richard Gwyn is published by Parthian (2005)

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