All Dogs Are Blue - Rodrigo de Souza Leao

All Dogs Are Blue was the final novel written by Rodrigo de Souza Leao before his death in 2008. Set mainly in a Brazilian psychiatric hospital, the text is a flood of sense-impressions, recollections and hallucinations, a narrative full of tangents and non-sequiters. The narrator has been admitted to the hospital after smashing up his parents’ house; once inside, he describes his interactions with staff, fellow inmates including the ominously-named Fearsome Madman, and his spirit guides, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. In a surprising finale, he is released and becomes a messiah-figure for a group called ‘Todog’, with thousands of followers. 

Throughout the text, Souza Leao makes subtle links between madness and poverty; the asylum is hemmed in on all sides by slums, and living conditions within are grim. At times, paranoia seems a rational response to the narrator’s living conditions. In one wry aside, he remembers a time when ‘my psychiatrist took the bus with me, just to prove that there was no problem – that idea went down with a ton of money, plus her watch. The bus was robbed'. There is a sense of frustrated potential among the inmates, an inability to harness their attributes for positive uses. Fearsome Madman, for example, inspires respect but ‘wasn’t our leader, because crazy people are wrapped up in their own paranoia’. Another patient bangs his head endlessly against a wall. The narrator comments ‘imagine if that freak was a footballer. His headers would be unstoppable… maybe he’d get called up to play for Brazil’. 

As in many books, from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest to Will Self’s Umbrella, Souza Leao’s asylum acts as a microcosm of the society which built it. The relationship between the inmates and the forces of authority within the hospital is tense, marked by violence: ‘a psychiatrist came and bayoneted some chemical into my left eyebrow. Another, meanwhile, grabbed a lump of flesh, stretching it more and more so I wouldn’t feel the Benzetacil injection’. The influence and watchful eye of the church is ever present (‘from my cell you could see the Christ statue’) although redemption seems an unlikely prospect: ‘Some Christian, one Sunday, appeared right near my cell and left a little leaflet. My God! Fundamentalists are taking over the world. They’re even coming here to recruit the utterly fucked.’ There is a sense that the hospital regime deliberately fosters a feeling of alienation from normal society in its inmates: ‘I look at the newspaper and I can’t read any of it. They must have put me on a high dosage’.

The narrator’s feelings of paranoia increase after the unexplained death of Fearsome Madman. He imagines that the hospital is filled with undercover officers, and believes that he is under suspicion of murder. These paranoid delusions are similar to those discussed in Ned Beauman’s recent New Statesman article The Ruins of People’s Lives. In the essay, Beauman describes the phenomenon of ‘gang stalking’, defined as ‘a covert operation that is opened on an individual. The individual is then placed under overt and covert forms of surveillance… The secondary goals seem to be to make the target homeless, jobless, give them a breakdown, and the primary goal seems to be to drive the target to forced suicide’. The essay goes on to highlight online communities where individuals who see themselves as victims of gang stalking can discuss the experiences and offer mutual support to one another. Souza Leao’s narrator certainly fits in with this belief system. He is convinced he is under surveillance (‘I swallowed a chip yesterday’) and is able to identify similar feelings in his fellow inmates: ‘Why do all crazy people have the same paranoias? They’re always being followed by a secret agent.’

Where Souza Leao differs from Beauman is in his level of empathy with the victims of gang stalking. For Beauman, the online communities he frequents offer up the equivalent to ‘ruin porn’, which he ‘will launder in my work like dirty money’. Perhaps due to his own experiences of mental illness, Souza Leao’s book contains more heart. After his release, the narrator forms a group called ‘Todog’ similar to the communities mentioned by Beauman, although existing in the physical world. The group’s membership may look the same, but the aims are different. At first, he says, ‘the meetings were delightful, each of us talking about our lives with extraterrestrials. Some had had chips implanted’, but under the narrator’s guidance they move away from this cycle of reinforcement towards finding a universal language of empathy and inclusion. The words are gibberish, but crowds are attracted by the sentiment of Todog. Frightened by the group’s popularity, the authorities move in an arrest the narrator, but in his absence the movement takes on a momentum of its own, beyond his control or that of the police. 

All Dogs Are Blue is an intriguing novel, filled with energy and poetic imagery. There is an air of naivety, or childishness, in Souza Leao’s imaginative words, reinforced by the title, which could be an allusion to the paintings of Franz Marc, and his own links with outsider art – but the book itself is extremely disciplined, each sentence containing layers of meaning. There is no extraneous detail within the 100 or so pages. Most of all, his determination to show the humanity of his narrator, to show him as more than the sum of his delusions, shines through from the text, and marks this out as an impressive addition to the And Other Stories catalogue.