Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller

This was Carol Emshwiller's first novel, originally published in 1988. She'd been writing for decades at that point, though, and publishing short fiction since the early 1950s. So my first question reading it was: how long was she working on it?

It's a short book, something like an allegory or a fable. And some elements feel very New Wave or classic-SF - there's a scientist with a major research project in his basement; that kind of thing - while the style and concerns are more modern and feminist. (Though, given the timing, clearly second-wave feminist, which could be important to understanding it.)

Emshwiller was mostly a writer of short fiction, and she writes this novel like a short-story writer: quickly, tightly, without extra details, explaining only as much as she has to and moving on to the next moment immediately.

The main character of Carmen Dog is not named that, though she is a dog, and she does have an unquenchable desire to sing Carmen, to be an opera diva.

But let me get to the premise first. This is a fantasy novel written in a SF style, about a massive unexpected and unexplained transformation in the world. Well, I say "world," but the book takes place in the US - the New York area, more precisely - and its viewpoint is both expansive and tight, so I would not be quick to assume the transformation is happening everywhere in the same way.

But here, in the US, women are turning into animals. And female animals are turning into women. Emshwiller does not want to treat these as two different phenomena; they are the same thing. All female beings who live closely with human men - I think that's the point; this is happening to pets, mostly, not to wild animals far off in the wilderness - are "moving up and down the evolutionary scale," as if that scale has suddenly become a game of Chutes and Ladders.

And, in the one house where we start the novel, the wife - never named, never a speaking role - is turning into a snapping turtle. At the same time, their beloved pedigreed golden retriever, Pooch, is having to take on care for the three children, starting to talk, and forming more complex thoughts and desires. She's our heroine: she wants to sing opera. (But she also still wants, at least at first, the things she wanted before: to be helpful and loyal and faithful, to care for and protect her family and master.)

The narrative mostly follows Pooch, as she travels, Candide-like, through the rapidly changing society, as "females" are all thrown into one category - with about as many rights as the half of them who were originally animals - and the men from Institutes of Motherhood and other big, "logical" edifices to understand and contain - and, most of all control - both this transformation and "females" in general.

The metaphor is not particularly subtle, obviously. Women are treated like animals by men, or maybe "no better than." And Emshwiller's tendency to be general keeps the metaphor strongly in the foreground: major characters here are only "the doctor" and "the master." Only a couple of the men even get names, though all of the women do - some of them, more than one name, as they transform and change and take on new roles.

And, centrally, all of the "females" are in roughly the same position: all somewhere in the middle, with elements of animal and human mixed and mingled. They can talk and have feathers; they want to sing opera but can only bark at the moment. They are sexy and passionate women while still being king snakes. Again, this is not a story about individuals moving up or down, or any contrast between individuals - it is entirely about the mass of "females" - the word Emshwiller uses most consistently; these are not necessarily "women" - and both what they are becoming and what the society around them is doing in response.

This is a sequence of moments rather than a complex narrative - events do follow each other, but there's a random, stochastic element to the book that I'm sure Emshwiller intended: this is an unknown event that transforms everything, which means it's all unexpected and contingent. It's not random, but it does hop and skip and jump through odd moments as it traces Pooch's travails in this transformed Manhattan.

The log-line would be "quirky feminist fable," and Emshwiller strongly hits all three words of that: it's an imaginative, distinctive, utterly original book that a reader might have some minor questions about while reading but should find compelling and fascinating.