Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien

Book Review by Olga Katsovskiy

A strong title has this ability to call attention to itself, like an echo in a deep well you cannot help but peer into. Madeleine Thien’s second novel, Dogs at the Perimeter, achieves this. I stumbled upon it at the library stacks and wanted to know what it meant. 

Interweaving the narratives of three central characters, the novel details atrocities of the Cambodian genocide. Janie, an electrophysiologist working in a research center in Montreal, is a Canadian Cambodian child refugee whose past haunts her present-day life. She lives apart from her husband, who has taken on primary caregiver responsibility for their toddler. Janie embarks on a personal journey in search of Hiroji, a colleague with a shared trauma who has vanished in pursuit of his long-lost brother Junichiro “James” in Cambodia. The plot blurs dream and reality, with Janie as the leading character.

While the novel focuses on the horrors under the Khmer Rouge, this is a tragically timeless story of war and its aftermath. Janie struggles to move forward even after thirty years have passed. She remembers her brother, who, like countless child soldiers, had become desensitized to unfathomable crimes to survive. Thien’s prose incredibly portrays the ordeal through Janie’s child-like lens.

“I followed my parents into the street. I thought the buildings, the hospitals, the banks and restaurants, the temples and market had all been tipped sideways, spilling everyone and everything into the road.” (p. 68)

Janie’s innocence and her relationship with her brother is most compelling. There is a scene of Janie thinking about tying her son’s wrist to hers with a string to keep him close (p. 38), which mirrors her brother tying their wrists together when they were children so that one would wake if one of them was taken while they slept (p. 94). Janie’s mother taught her that “threads are tied around the infant’s wrists to bind her soul to her body” (p. 253).  The concept reminded me of the red string legend originating from Chinese mythology, where two people predestined to be together are tied by a single red string around their pinkie fingers. A string that cannot be severed.

“Between us, she said, I had known love, I had lived a childhood that might sustain me. I remembered beauty. Long ago, it had not seemed necessary to note its presence, to memorize it, to set the dogs out at the perimeter. […] Guard the ones you love, she told me. Carry us with you into the next life.” (p. 135) 

The embedded title highlights one of the major themes of the novel, the bonds between loved ones transcend time and place. 

Olga Katsovskiy is a writer, editor, and educator from Boston, Massachusetts. She works in a healthcare organization during the day and moonlights as a writing instructor at Cambridge Center for Adult Education, a non-profit providing multidisciplinary classes in the heart of Harvard Square. She proudly serves as Creative Nonfiction Editor for Minerva Rising Press and is an Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor for jmww journal. Her essays have been published in Atticus Review: The Attic, Barzakh Magazine, Gone Lawn Journal, Prose Online, and others. For more visit: theweightofaletter.com