I was very surprised by this book, from its form to its topics and how they were treated: loss, nature, toxic relationships, and who we become or who we lose within ourselves by staying in them. The form is simple and yet flows like a river, dreamlike as it moves between nature and the destruction humans leave behind, and most profoundly, the great relationship between animals and humans, especially between humanity’s best and most undeserved friend: the dog. 

I have a dog myself, and I spend every possible second lost in nature, so this book spoke to me in a very personal way. I loved how Fatima Bhutto links her life lessons to what nature teaches us, through her dog and by observing the impact humans have on Earth, and the concept of maternity: what does it mean to be a mother and to have a family? This is not to say that Bhutto equates herself with motherhood simply because she has a dog; the book is far more complex than that essentialist reduction. Instead, she is confronted with the need to redefine what maternity and family must mean to a woman.

I whisper the azan in the puppies’ ears one night soon after they are born, echoing Muslim tradition that sings the call to prayer in a newborn’s ear after birth so it is the first sound they hear. [...] In some sense, I have been searching for a mother since I was a child. I spend the next month staying awake late at night out of choice, no longer deprivation, so I can watch them and hold the ones that I think will go to other homes, desperate not to lose time. I want to love them without fear. I didn’t expect to learn this much about love or God or grace from any of this. I didn’t expect to be so moved by the simple act of care.¹

This is ultimately a memoir about love. Not romantic love, not about the Man, who is, let’s face it, an absolute idiot (she is just too elegant to say it), and despite the fact it is clear from the beginning that she escapes him, you just want to punch him in the face. In fact, you want every woman who has ever had to cope with men like him to collectively punch him in the face, no questions asked. Instead,  the love that Fatima talks about in this novel is the love for a beauty that goes beyond our presence in the world; the love of those who care for us and those we care for, whatever links we may have. A love that goes beyond what is expected of us, into the realm of the mystic, of a beauty that leaves us speechless, which is quite a feat, considering how much we humans love to talk.

Two relationships in particular will give you goosebumps: Fatima and Coco, her dog, and Fatima and Allegra, her best friend, her chosen family. This trio of mighty ladies go through terrible pregnancies, COVID-19, horrible men, the loss of others and themselves, but in the end, they arrive at the calm shores of self-understanding and appreciation. I’m choosing not to call this self-love, because that feels like such a reduction of what this book is about. Fatima Bhutto loses herself, but she does not find her way back through introspection alone; she does so in the wild. It is through the animals and nature that she is able to return to her body, to her writing, and ultimately, to her sense of identity.

The figure of the deer is present in a mix of the magical and reality, and what an animal this is. On my last trip to the northern mountains of the Basque Country, my dog and I saw a deer on the other side of a hill, covered by the pines, looking at us. My dog and the deer looked into each other’s eyes - though this may be me romanticising the moment. They were probably more concerned with figuring out what the other creature was than sharing some profound understanding. I don’t have a tiny Jack Russell terrier like Fatima, but a 30-kilo good boy who, at the time, had been rescued for only a couple of months and was still struggling to listen to me. But the moment those two animals looked at each other, the tamed one and the wild one, it allowed me to understand something Fatima continuously explored in her writing: where do humans fit in this puzzle?

We have tamed our own wild ways only to become unhinged in other ways, destroying everything around us, like the Man in the book, always moving, always taking, and never stopping long enough to care. But in the presence of mighty nature, it is impossible not to care. I can only thank Fatima for reminding me of that, because although I have not suffered what she has suffered, she does what great writers do best: transforms the deeply personal into something universal, something every reader can connect with.

Once you have seen a beast laid bare, you can never quite unsee it. I am not a wolf by blood, the poet Osip Mandelstam wrote, only my equal can kill me. The man was not my equal. It took me years, but once I saw it, I left him and never, ever looked back.² 

Another thing that I absolutely love about this book are its moments of mundanity. In film, revelations rarely happen. We are complex creatures; we might be non-believers who still think about God from time to time, find unexpected lessons from others while in lockdown, or completely lose our sense of time and reality. Fatima captures these seemingly mundane moments and transforms them into a quest of the self: majestic women sleeping on the floor as if they were mighty warriors against a dragon.

And then there is her ability to connect us with forgiveness. The way she forgives the years she spent with the Man, the way she comes to understand that she could not have reached this point without first walking the path she took. And she does not punish herself for that. I myself have been guilty of allowing my own thoughts to be the worst police out there. But Fatima does not fall into that, or into self-pity. She is aware of the flaws in her past self, flaws she would not forgive in the person she currently is, but she understands that she only exists because of those fatal mistakes; she could not be who she is today without them.

Animals remind me that time is elastic and to live well is to remember only that we must live now and do so with purity, free of fear and alive with the possibilities of wonder. I have been lucky to learn so much from dogs. They have taught me about my own failings, forgiven my own lapses of care and kindness, and show me that it is possible, if you can be true of heart, to redeem those shameful moments.³

American author Alexander Chee endorsed on the cover of the book that this memoir was the song you sing to make yourself brave, and I rarely borrow other people’s words, but I couldn’t agree more. This is a book that encourages you to be brave even if you need eight years to be so. Even if you know you cannot be brave right now, just know that you will be able to do so in the future. The poetic force of Bhutto’s pen will carry you. I wanted to go back to her time and time again, to sit there and imagine Coco, small but mighty, barking at her many terrible enemies. The book plays beautifully with time.  Our point of reference is Bhutto’s relationship with the Man, but even that jumps back and forth, creating the same strange sense of time many of us felt during COVID-19; a little lost, a little untethered. Yet Fatima never attempts to emulate or reduce the horrors during that period, and the book never feels defined by them, in case you are worried. I must confess that I had not read much of Bhutto’s work before this book. Now, I feel I must never stop.

There is a special mention for the title of the book, The Hour Of The Wolf, which comes from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s gothic film.  The term “hour of the wolf” refers to a period in which change takes place, the disintegration of the artist, the horror, and eventually, the understanding. This mirrors what happens to Bhutto herself; she spends many moons in her own hour of the wolf, moving through its darkness until she makes it to the other side. And there, the sun shines through the forest, the deer salute her, and perhaps the reader, too.

This is a book for you if you have ever felt lost, if you have been wounded, if you have stared at the wild and thought, Wow, the magic of that!