Djamel White: “The real pain here isn’t bullet wounds”

The author of the Booker longlisted All Them Dogs on pop culture and exploring the spectrum of masculinities in his novel

Though gang wars and violence feature prominently in All Them Dogs, familial relationships are also at the heart of this novel.

Author Djamel White (Conor Horgan)

For me, it’s a novel about belonging.

Tony is looking to be accepted, but he seems to have this twisted idea of who he should be accepted by and what that acceptance might look like. And this idea of his gets mixed up with this idea of being feared and admired. It’s based on the role models he has seen growing up, the experiences he has had as a young person. Ultimately, what he wants is something universal, which is why readers are finding something relatable in him. Perhaps a path to empathy despite all kinds of horrific things he does.

Does the idea of physical home elude him because he doesn’t feel at home in his own body, and because of the shame his sexuality may attract when it becomes public knowledge?

I don’t address it directly — the kind of shame or contradictions that might be going inside Tony. But it goes without saying that, given the environment he was in, if Tony doesn’t feel safe in his own body, how can he feel safe anywhere? I think that reading could be tracked across the whole novel.

240pp, ₹2113; John Murray

The novel is peppered with several pop culture references. Were you inspired by gangster movies while constructing the grammar of All Them Dogs?

Interestingly, one notices this cyclicity in media itself. For example, in the early episodes of The Sopranos (1999), people are watching The Godfather (1972), and I quite liked it, but I can’t really pin down if that inspired me. I don’t know why I was so into shows like The Wire (2002) or the Irish drama Love/Hate (2010), and of course, The Sopranos and Goodfellas, all of them. But I think it may be the characters, who come from really low circumstances, becoming intoxicated in the rush, the danger, and everything else this lifestyle promises them before their eventual undoing. For me, there was always something attractive in exploring this tension of danger lurking behind every corner.

Inevitably, in all of these stories, there was usually a betrayal. Somebody would have to kill a friend or some family member, so relationships were always in question. And these were moments of heartbreak that I always found possessing high tension and drama.

Tony speaks in a measured way not only because of his limited vocabulary but also because of the tense environment. Did you maintain a sort of word bank for Tony?

No, I didn’t. Tony’s vocabulary is the same as that of many of my family members, and the communities I’ve grown up in.

But intuitively, there was always going to be these descriptions that Tony was not going to be able to pin down and articulate. Sometimes, it’s at the expense of what could be otherwise quite satisfying or concise writing. For example, there have been many occasions where I have had a sentence that could strike the bones of what I was trying to say, but I had to withdraw it because it wasn’t true to what Tony would say or think.

Tony is so driven by emotion with this chip on his shoulder and how he feels he should be treated by people around him, which makes sense for him to do some of the things he does and express things he feels. So, it’s a matter of restraint, trusting the voice.

Regarding the voice of this character, there’s a particular sentence when Tony is mulling over what he has heard, and is at his most articulate: “A name in the right mouth was as good as a weapon as any gun.”

Yes, there’s a kind of poetic wisdom that comes over him at times. This particular sentence is the one where he is in a state of heightened emotion after hearing his own name being used by the person who he’s holding a gun up to.

It’s destabilising for him. It’s just the contrast in the scene: he has got a gun, but he has got none of the power. It’s this realisation that he’s not going to follow through with what he has come here to do. Towards the end as well, we see the same thing that he realises that he has always been a follower. He has always been comfortable in somebody else deciding for him.

At what point do you decide that what you’re writing isn’t glorifying violence and what you’ve noted is the right kind of description for the crime scene?

I wonder what it means to glorify because I don’t think it’s depicted in a way in the novel where Tony meaningly gains anything from his violence. He glorifies it as a concept, but in actuality he tends to suffer for it.

With a lot of good crime writing, that idea of glorification is constantly in question because you’re seeing the results of these acts of violence on characters’ psyche. But I don’t worry about it too much.

If All Them Dogs was a straight up revenge thriller, where Tony would’ve killed everyone in his path, then in the end he’s on top of the world — he’s a millionaire now and everything comes up rosy in the wake of all of these snapped necks and broken rib cages, then in a sense there’d be an element of glorification there.

In many situations, Tony is the principal actor in the scene but is removed from it. How did you create such incidents where he was staged to execute multiple roles?

There’s no playbook that I can think of. These are the things that you discover when you’re writing a scene. You’ve two characters, and you’ve them in a conversation with each other. There’s just something looming or imminent. So, there’s no niche answer to this.

It’s a constant process of discovery. You go into a scene more than once and it takes a different shape each time. Sometimes you’re writing a scene not knowing how it’ll end. But when you return to it in the second draft, you’ve more information, new insight into your character’s perspective because you know more about what’s going to unfold, which adds some layers to it.

How many drafts of All Them Dogs did you do?

A few. They’re not neatly numbered because I was working on Word documents, so I was constantly going back and forth, giving a little to the draft and taking a little out.

When I’d get stuck, maybe I’d go back to the start. There was one clean redraft in which I had 50,000 words in. I put that aside and started with a blank document, rewriting everything and starting with the Patsy scene, which was earlier somewhere in the latter part of the first draft.

Perhaps it turned out to be the right decision because this version was the one that eventually got me representation with an agent, then publication of the novel.

Though a variety of dogs feature in the novel, it isn’t supposed to be literal. How did you come up with this title, which resembles Tony’s manner of speaking?

It wasn’t always this title. I had another one but I was just trying out a few different things, seeing how agents and editors would respond to them. And when I put All Them Dogs out there, it was very much an aural thing. It sounded like the name of this novel, and other people responded similarly. Sometimes it feels like naming a baby, oh, he looks like a Toby.

There are several step-relationships in the novel, and Tony discovers each one and attaches meaning to what he thinks of them, who he can trust and who he can be wary of.

The way Tony chooses to structure his relationships or chooses the proximity in which he places himself has everything to do with his version of this hegemonic ideal, I suppose.

Kenny, whom he once admired, and considered a really good, loyal friend, is no longer living up to this idea of what Tony thinks a good, proper man should be, so he’s now disgusted by him. And then we see Archie, his half-brother, who represents this other side of masculinity — high-performing, academic, intelligent — as compared to Tony who is more brawny. So, these diametrical opposites resent each other and give a familial tension to the novel.

But, on the other hand, Flute is everything Tony would expect a man to be, and Tony is interested in knowing Flute’s position in the crime family: how much power that might give him, and how much power does Flute have over him. Then, the connection later brings him back to Archie, who threatens to pull the rug from under everything because Tony discovers the type of man he’s revolted by and the one he adores, but there might have been a connection between them in the past, which unsettles him.

While a spectrum of masculinities is explored in the novel, there are several things that softens their edges. One heartbreaking scene is when Tony realises that perhaps Archie and his ma are one unit, and the distance between them as they’re sitting across the table fighting over something is increasing, isolating him.

I mean they’re people; they’re hurting. It’s a strange dynamic these three explore because odds are one of them at a given time is feeling what Tony is feeling in that scene. And this dynamic is going to shift when you’ve got this kind of tumultuous relationship between three people, and in doing that my intention was to make a story feel true. A story where extravagant things happen but ultimately the trials and tribulations of the characters are grounded on a human level. The real pain here isn’t bullet wounds, it’s a fragmented connection.

Saurabh Sharma (they) is a nonbinary, queer writer, essayist, and culture critic. On X: @writerly_life; Instagram: @writerlylife.