WORDS KATIE McFADDEN
Elske Rahil graduated from Trinity with an M.Phil in Creative Writing and Gender and Women’s Studies; at thirty years old, she has already forged an impressive career. Starring in plays at the Abbey and Gaiety Theatres, she is also a playwright and has published a series of short stories. In her debut novel Between Dog and Wolf, Rahil charts the experiences of three final year English students at Trinity, exploring the complexities of the fragile border between adolescence and adulthood, in what is a compelling psychological portrait of the student mind.
Drugs, alcohol, sordid pornography, and graphic sex scenes; this novel is not for the faint hearted. The language is coarse and repellant, at once revolting and enthralling, brimming with blunt observations on an insatiable student sexuality, where perverse and even violent urges dominate. Rahil has an extraordinary capacity to articulate those innermost feelings we’ve all had but cannot put our finger on, let alone express in language, and the vulgarity which at times makes you want to slam the book shut, is more than tempered by these compelling observations.
Cassandra and Helen are childhood friends and flatmates in college. Cassandra is a model, tall and bony, with a dead mother and a wise grandmother. Dislocated from her peers, she has been left scarred by a damaging relationship with an older man, and is slowly sinking into a lonely depression. Helen is smaller, softer with bouncing ringlets and bright blue eyes, losing her virginity and falling in love for the first time with Oisin from Clonmel. Set apart from his childhood friends by his prestigious university education, Oisin struggles to maintain his image with “the lads from Clonmel” whilst respecting his relationship with Helen.
Starkly different backgrounds separate Cassandra, Helen and Oisin, but they are irrevocably linked by a shared desperation to forge a sense of self as they grapple with what it means to become an adult. Critical and cynical of issues of “love” in the lecture hall, the characters find themselves paradoxically and idealistically striving towards it as a means of self affirmation. It is their idealism and romantic impulses that makes this such a seductive novel. However, as they beg for love and recognition from one another, Rahil simultaneously portrays them as being totally unable to relate to each other; this story is primarily one of alienation, of characters who can only connect in fleeting, usually sexual moments, as sex becomes representative of the struggle for unity conceived by the novel.
Rahil’s belief that “sex is political to an extent, it’s not just sex ever”, is deftly played out in Between Dog and Wolf. Sex becomes a battleground between the sexes, a struggle for power, and sex in the novel is not intended to arouse, but to shock. The central conflicts of the novel stem from characters struggling to fulfill patriarchal gender roles, and this division is played out most powerfully by the characters conflicting sexual desires. Hurt by Helen, Oisin is terrified of being branded “pussy-whipped”, wanting instead to “leave on a high”, to tell the lads back in Clonmel about “his wild nights at Trinners”, he wants to leave with “his oats scattered”. Rahil gives us a darkly humorous portrayal of both sexes’ conflicting thoughts and priorities in a subtle critique of patriarchal society, while Cassandra’s grandmother challenges readers to think of “any woman who is suited to her world”.
In Between Dog and Wolf, Rahil illuminates the absurdity of the college years, the absurdity of the gravity everything takes on, the pain we cause ourselves through crippling insecurities, “How ridiculous it seems, sometimes, to be young,” as a hungover Helen muses. But she goes further than this. It is a book that suggests our profound isolation through the fact we only exist in our own consciousness; subject to perceptions and negative impulses generated by the mind — never able to begin to understand anyone around us. Her characters are all deeply flawed and depressed, but as Rahil has said herself, “It’s just what people are like.” Between Dog and Wolf will deeply unsettle, revolt and at the same time move you as you spot glimpses of yourself in its pages.
