This one is special. Paul Yoon's slim, devastating novel, Etna, is in a category of its own — a category that contains adjectives like "profound," and "uncanny."
Narrated by a battle-scarred ex-military dog named Etna, Yoon's novel inevitably invites comparisons to that other story out this summer about a weary warrior trying to make his way home. I'm no help here, given that I haven't seen Christopher Nolan's movie yet and I haven't read Homer's Odyssey in years. No matter. Yoon's novel is so brilliant, it deserves to command the critical spotlight on its own.
The power of Etna rests in the authenticity of its canine narrator's voice — a dog conscripted into an unnamed war in an unnamed country. From the novel's very first page, Etna's voice is somber and poetic in its simplicity.
I was born near water. ...
My mother was there. My brothers and my sisters. An early memory: waking up to a den of pale noses surrounding me before our mother came, the silhouette of her face looming over us in the sky, the tall triangles of her ears pocketing the smell of the coast.
This puppyhood idyll abruptly ends when a young woman in uniform arrives at the farm one day, announcing that she's looking for dogs to train to assist troops coming from North America and Europe. Over his mother's frantic barking, Etna is scooped up by the soldier. She tells him he looks "strong" and that she can tell he's "special"; Soojin is able to understand Etna in a way other humans can't.
This soldier, named Soojin, drops Etna off at a base for training and Etna tells us that, among other skills: "I learned to locate men who were hiding. ... I learned what to listen for and what to smell out: nicotine and sweat; urine and gunpowder; ... I learned to attack a particular artery in the thigh or go for the genitals or the throat."
Etna also tells us that he learned: "Explosives had vapors. Even buried ones. The vapors came up through the soil. Vapors of explosives smelled sweet like the sugar in chewing gum or the toothpaste [my handler] used to use."
All those skills are essential in combat. By the time this war ends (although Etna learns no wars ever really end), he's been hurt six times, and he's lost humans and other dogs he's grown attached to. No wonder, as Etna overhears a cruel soldier say, he looks like "a zombie dog" who might be better off put to sleep. Instead, Etna resolves to run off and try to find his dimly remembered home.
Like all great anti-war stories (I'm thinking, for instance, of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien) Yoon's novel conjures up breathless combat scenes, none more charged than a climactic ambush that briefly reunites Etna with Soojin. The fact that Etna is "just" a dog, fighting for no higher purpose than what his training requires him to do, underscores, without lecturing, how pointless all this battlefield agony is.
It's Etna's voice — composed of simple declarative sentences wedded to a fatalistic canine outlook — that lingers long after this short novel is over. In that extended ambush scene, a mine explodes and Etna says: "Everyone screamed the same when they got wounded. I learned that. It was impossible to tell one human from another human in these moments."
That's as much of a message as this extraordinary novel offers. Maybe it's enough of one.
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