The canine narrator of Paul Yoon’s Etna – ex-military, orphaned and trekking through a war-torn wasteland – thinks more than he barks. His curious thoughts, sparingly rendered, never reveal the specifics of ‘here’, ‘this place’ or ‘this country’s language’. We know only that the nation he inhabits has four terrains (‘The Field’, ‘The City’, ‘The Mountains’, ‘The Sea’) and is occupied by French, German and American soldiers.

Plucked from a nowheresville farm, Etna is trained by a specialist unit of handlers. He forms a pack with another volcanically named dog, Fuji, and races through the ‘new noises and new voices and concrete and dirt’ of war. Time jolts forward with two words: ‘Four years’. By the next page, Etna’s handlers have been blown up and Fuji has gone missing. Set on returning home, Etna embarks on a journey over the course of which he encounters another dog, missionaries, a donkey, bad men, more dogs, a doctor, a pet psychic and, finally, an oracular bird. 

Yoon’s prose is most interesting when Etna looks awry at human behaviour. The slang of chummy soldiers (‘perv’) is italicised and defamiliarised. Similes have a four-legged proximity to the ground, with Etna comparing his handler’s speech to a taut ‘line of string’ and his scars to ‘old worms’. Moral codes