Obviously some judgments in life are irreversible. These tend to be the ones you make about people and your relationship with them, for once the judgment is made and, in any way shared – discursively or in the form of an action to change the relationship – you alone are not in control of the events consequent on that publication of the judgement. For most people hate being the object of judgement. Perhaps that is why we need fiction in which to live in part, where judgement can be safely made, although even that may be complicated in fact.
I write this because I am in process of taking notes on a novel I loved, All Them Dogs by Djamel White, currently on the Booker longlist. This blog is just about one review I read of this deeply impressive novel, because I suddenly became fascinated by the review in its own right. It is an early review before anyone thought this would be adjudged literary fiction (perhaps it is the role of the Booker Prize to raise the issue of what ‘literary fiction’ is and if it really is a category of its own). For me it is such a category, and relates to the qualities of the writing itself from sentence structure to naraarative configurations. Now recognizing that quality does not mean you wil necessarily like what is produced – a point I looked at in relation to Gwendoline Riley’s Booker long-listed The Palm Room in the blog at this link. But there is a quality like that which makes White’s novel ‘literary’ too and in a way tbat I like enormously. Arnott sums that up as White’s ability to give ‘real dynamism to his prose that combines street slang with poetic simile’.
But I thought Jake Arnott expressed all this so much better, without quite looking at the nature of the writen prose itself very extensively, which I will do in my blog, when I get round to it. But Arnott was a wise choice as a critic for no-one knows better than he, what he calls in his review, the ‘harsh restrictions of the crime genre’, such that he singles out what he feels the ambition of the novel, to represent in third-person prose as:
first-person stream of consciousness that follows Chekhov’s notion that that the writer’s duty is to take the part of the guilty men. The character of Tony is a bold choice for this endeavour, often appearing an arrogant bully beyond the reach of even his author’s compassion. And though many frailties are revealed below the braggadocio, the true emotions and psychosexuality of this angry and battered male psyche remain unknowable. But perhaps that’s part of the realism of this novel. [*]
Now that paragraph is what made me want to use its excellent example – it moves into a judgement of the novel that could limit its values, that is that ‘the true emotions and psychosexuality of this angry and battered male psyche remain unknowable‘, for the word ‘true’ is a weighty descriptor with value beyond being merely descriptive. But in the next sentence, he takes the judgement, that the psychological insight of the novel lacks some kind of truth, away: with that cautious; ‘But perhaps that’s part of the realism of this novel’. There you have a weighty balancing act between the possibility that the representation of the ‘psychologically real’ is at variance with a notion of the ‘psychologically true’ – and in that step back from judgement I hope I’ll show when I look at this novel is its value as ‘literature’, as letters meant to stand some test of enduring grasp of both ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ through the manner of delivery of a story, that becomes actually the content of the story.
Now along the way, Arnott raises things I felt when reading but consider to be not things that will sway my grasp of the novel, despite their being appropriate to acknowledge. One of them is the difficulty of the thrust and drive of the crime / gangster novel which lard the scenes with thick blood while propelling you forward nevertheless relentless as if one could change the lines in Macbeth’s (Act 3, Scene 4) speech from:
... For mine own good,
All causes shall give way. I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
to:
... For my own self,
Other wants shall give way. Through blood I've run,
Deep raced, driving through its dense backward flow,
Going slow now would be as hard as stop.
Arnott says much the same, praising the narrative momentum needed in the ‘realist’, by which we mean in modern terms viscerally unforgiving and based in a lumpen class setting, never stepping out of yet more blood and guts and human degradation let flow and children abandoned along the way, crime thriller with its strong types (‘sharklike’ being ones that bite and devour without pausing when the kill is on) just before showing that the many aims of the novelist can complicate plots if you’d like the chase of sensation so far.
… Like its sharklike protagonist, the narrative rarely stops moving, and the strength of the novel lies in this episodic quality: the gritty realism of each scene is confidently portrayed and exuberantly realised.
The plotting, however, seems a little imposed and overcomplicated. And the heart of the story, the doomed love between Tony and Flute, risks getting lost in the confusion. There’s a great moment when the erotic spark between the two suddenly ignites at a student party they gatecrash. But after that it seems only to catch fire intermittently, scarcely enough to feed the burning sense of longing and suspicion that Tony is meant to feel later. Both men present as blank slates in terms of sexuality, which could add to the intensity of their predicament, but instead seems to dissipate into an obscure and alienated state of desire. Amid a disjointed sex scene there’s an intriguing exchange when Tony tells Flute: “I just didn’t know if you’ve done it before, that’s all,” and it’s uncertain whether they are talking about killing or sex with another man. Tragically, their emotional joint enterprise seems more secure in the former than the latter. [*]
The perception of the ambiguity in the conversation between Flute and Tony (who ought to have a nickname too I suppose) is precisely right and at the centre of the novel, as is the revelation of how ‘Flute’ got his nickname as a fourteen year old boy showing his cock (using the boyish term ‘mickey’ in the novel) to another boy; brilliantly plotted is the fact that this boy was Tony’s hated half-brother. Now, for Arnott, there is the judgement lurking behind the admiration that the exploration of how sexual activity, from the idea of shared exposure to allowing another man to anally and painfully penetrate you as Tony does Flute, is under-explained or demonstrated.
Arnott says that a ‘fiercer sexual and emotional charge might have provided a stronger counterpoint to the more heightened violence that follows’ .But that assumes that such events need to be something that demands narrative exploration, which it is part of the wonder of this novel – and in part through its management of its prose and narrative – to suggest may not be the case. Maybe I will say more in the next blog. And remember the glorious Arnott peppers all this with ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’: that is the kind of uncertainty about judgement that I like.
Of course he gives the novel false direction by nearly advising that Flute should be a male version of the film nor femme fatale to give the relationship the development that it needs:
And one feels that perhaps there wasn’t enough passion in the first place, that their luckless relationship could have been more developed to give a real poignancy to the lethally heartfelt double-cross of its denouement. It’s a noir trope, after all, with the tall and surly Flute shaping up as homme fatale. [*]
I am one who does not feel that, nor read the discoveries of a different and queered landscape of emotion as being ‘oddly coy’. When Tony thinks of a future with Flute abroad it is less coy than a kind of male bovarism that Riley attempts in The Palm House, in both cases about men making a show of themself as significant to sometimes unseen and anonymous watchers, the bit Arnott quotes being Tony’s “daydream of beaches and cocktails and cutting shapes on the dancefloor and not a single glance over our shoulders”. This can’t be described accurately, as Arnott does, as a touch of ‘tenderness’.
My own feelings about the novel is that it re-imagines the style of masculinity. And it does so by exposing and challenging available models, which is all I think Arnott finds and thence puzzles over, especially that stereotype of ‘toxic masculinity’. Yet Arnott is so cautious in his judgement he does set tne stage for use of the resources you might need, if far too simply and with too many assumptions about ‘Eros and Thanatos’;
Toxic masculinity, that repressed and repressive male energy that does so much to fuel brutality and abuse, sometimes finds itself on the brink of a vulnerable homoeroticism. In Djamel White’s debut novel All Them Dogs, a vividly propulsive neo-noir, two violent men discover that murderous desires can lead to love as well as death. This is a fast-paced crime thriller with a psychosexual twist, set in a dangerously Freudian arena of Eros and Thanatos. [*]
But this is honestly good critical work not because of what it proposes but because of the uncertainty of judgement that frames it. I wish I could be like that.
Wirh love
Steven
________
[*] ake Arnott (2026) ‘All Them Dogs by Djamel White review – murderous desires in the badlands of Dublin’ In The Guardian [online] (Tue 14 Apr 2026 09.00 BST, Last modified on Tue 14 Apr 2026 09.02 BST) Available: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/apr/14/all-them-dogs-by-djamel-white-review-murderous-desires-in-the-badlands-of-dublin
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