Dreamers Of The Day
(Published June, 2008)

"Rosie nosed beneath the light cotton coverlet and corkscrewed round and round, all the while producing the wheezes and mutterings peculiar to dachshunds attempting to get comfortable for the night. At long last she settled and sighed and slept." That scene is set in a luxury hotel in Cairo in 1921, and it's going to be plain to most of you reading this that the author knows dachshunds. And you're right. Mary Doria Russell, Pulitzer-nominated novelist from whose new book Dreamers Of The Day those lines are taken, shares her Cleveland-area home with a longhaired girl named Annie. We have been lucky enough to trade e-mails with Ms. Russell and to attend an appearance at a bookstore, and we can tell you that if she appears at a store near you, you should drop everything and go. She's one of those rare authors as eloquent in person as in print. In fact, going back and re-reading passages from her book after we met her, we could hear her voice doing the narration. We traveled 2½ hours through a violent spring storm to hear Ms. Russell, and it was worth every miserable minute on the road. We asked her the woefully clichéd question, "how did you come to write this book." And without a sigh to betray how often she must have responded to the same query, she said …

Like a lot of Baby Boomers, I saw the movie Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 when I was a young teenager, and Lawrence had a tremendous impact on my life. I read Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and all the biographies, and so on.

Lawrence became a sort of third parent to me. My mother was steel. My father was heart. Lawrence was scholarship – nobody else in my family provided that to me. In some ways, I followed in his footsteps, getting a Ph.D. in anthropology, learning multiple languages, living on other continents.

I hadn't really thought about him in years, though. My life had taken an unexpected turn – my first novel The Sparrow was a totally unexpected success, and I'd gone on to write the sequel Children Of God, and then I wrote A Thread Of Grace, a World War II thriller about the Jewish underground near Genoa during the Nazi occupation of Italy.

Thread took seven years of research – and they paid off, because the novel did get a Pulitzer nomination, but by 2005, I was completely exhausted and had decided to take a year off to rest up and read for pleasure instead of research.

I lasted 36 hours. On the second day of my "year off," I was lying on the sofa watching a documentary about T. E. Lawrence on the History Channel, and I suddenly realized that I was ten years older than Lawrence ever got to be.

He was only 46 when he was killed in that motorcycle wreck. I remember when I was a kid I thought, "Well, at least he wasn't young when he died."

I still had the biographies, and since I was going to take a year off and read for pleasure, I decided to go upstairs and dig one of them out. I was curious to see if I reacted differently as an adult, with all my own experiences and observations of life.

Now, there's another element of how I ended up writing Dreamers Of The Day. In 2001, when Osama bin Ladin took credit for the attacks on 9/11, his statement said that it was in part "revenge for the catastrophe of 80 years ago."

Nobody seemed to pay much attention to that, but when I heard it, I thought, "What the hell happened 80 years ago?" I had no idea, but clearly bin Ladin was pretty pissed off about it. But I was writing A Thread Of Grace, and three close relatives were dying of awful diseases, and I was simply stretched too thin to follow up on the curiosity. So "the catastrophe of 80 years ago" just got filed away as something I wondered about.

Then I got to the part in the Lawrence biography about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference. And I did the math.

In 1921, in a fancy hotel in Cairo, Winston Churchill, Lady Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence and a handful of other diplomats and oil men decided the fate of everyone in the Middle East to this day. It's their world. We just live in it. So that became the backdrop for Dreamers Of The Day.

We asked about Rosie, the dachshund who travels to Cairo with Agnes Shanklin, the novel's narrator. Rosie was a "defective" dog – badly kinked tail and poor coloring – born in a litter bred by Agnes' no-nonsense mother. Doomed to death by her imperfections, Rosie is rescued by Agnes, who has imperfections of her own. After Agnes loses her family to the 1918 influenza epidemic, Rosie is her sole companion, in her home near Cleveland and on her tour to Cairo. We asked Ms. Russell if including Rosie was merely a tribute to Annie, Ms. Russell's own dachshund.

Rosie was the backbone of that novel, really. When the puppy is born and about to be euthanized, Agnes not only sticks up for Rosie but also for herself. Mumma considers both Agnes and the puppy to be inferior offspring, unworthy of a bitch's energy – and that was a perfectly lovely opportunity to use "bitch" both properly and metaphorically!

Next, Rosie gives the stunned, bereaved and lonely Agnes someone to talk to, someone to care for, a reason to get a grip on herself and move on with her life. Rosie gets Agnes out into the sunshine, and is a loving companion who makes it possible for Agnes to travel without being truly alone.

In Cairo, the dog is the reason Agnes is noticed by the more august guests at the Semiramis Hotel, and the reason that Lawrence and Bell come to Agnes' aid. When Karl notices Agnes and Lawrence, it is the dachshund who catches his attention first, and later Rosie is Karl's "wingman," giving him a plausible and natural reason for approaching a stranger. Dogs are often the bridges between strangers.

And in the end, it is the dachshund's true nature as a fierce little hunter that sends Agnes into the Nile to rescue her, and sets up the end of the story. Honestly, I can't imagine this novel without Rosie!

Dreamers Of The Day cannot be considered a dachshund-centric book. But it's – and we don't say this to frighten you off – an important book. Toward the beginning of the narrative, Agnes Shanklin tells us "You won't really understand your times until you understand mine." She's right. But aside from that, she will become someone you like and want to spend more time with. You will say, "yes; that's the kind of a person who would own a dachshund."

To buy a copy of Dreamers Of The Day, click here.