AH, Dubai. The land where everything is bigger, better, shinier and newer. Where the answer to any problem is to throw money at it, until it goes away. Where if you aren’t wearing a timepiece the size of a small shack on your wrist and driving a car with enough resale value to seriously dent the global budget deficit, life has little meaning.

Oddly enough, this hasn’t resulted in a slew of novels that mine the — all too available — idiosyncrasies inherent in the Middle East’s most (in)famous city-state. There has been no shortage of breathless, morally and ethically admonitory “investigative” journalism pieces; Johann Hari’s mostly-discredited article in The Independent, for example, comes to mind, vacillating as it did between (largely accurate) horror stories of migrant worker labour camps, and slightly less dramatic tales of panicked expatriates sleeping in the Range Rovers in hotel parking lots after the 2008 global economic crash.

This lack of broader address is rather fortunate, because it gives Joseph O’Neill free reign to take on the Dubai unfettered by nuance or cultural conditioning in his novel, The Dog. His is not an Emirate tarnished by a property collapse, or panicked bail-outs; if anything, this is the biggest, baddest and blingiest the Emirate has ever been. And X, O’Neill’s protagonist, is in the middle of the glitz and glamour, living the high life of an in-house legal counsel to an obscenely wealthy Lebanese family, his days consisting of little more than (literally) rubber-stamping documents, and his nights split between ridiculous home massage chairs and exorbitant dalliances with prostitutes.

There are a hundred things wrong with Dubai, of course, from the overwhelming lack of taste to the slum conditions in which foreign (read: Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi) labourers live, if you can call it that. O’Neill doesn’t shy away from noting these things, although he does run verbal marathons of tortured logic when it comes to X actually explaining how he deals with the unpleasant realities of a life built on blood, sweat and tears in Dubai. But these are not, we soon realise, necessarily things that are inimically wrong within Dubai itself. X, a New York lawyer who fled his conception-mad girlfriend only to wind up working for a family of frankly mental Lebanese billionaires, is too smart to buy into this, and quite aware of the fact that much of the moral and ethical haze surrounding Dubai originates from the expatriate community than anywhere else.

X is a modern-day consigliere to the Batroses — a family of the layabout idle super-rich type, who seem to have very little to do in their lives other than come up with ways to make life gruelling for X, who as far as they’re concerned, has only “one function. You know what [it] is? It is to make sure nobody steals [from us].” It is however, we discover, a rather wide ranging “one function,” which soon begins to include booking Bryan Adams for a private concert and even tracking the weight of an obese Batros teenager.

His day is spent mostly writing quizzical e-mails (factual) to people in order to avoid doing any “real” work, or writing angry e-mails (fictional) to his employers. When not engaged in writing missives (mental or otherwise), X lives in a luxury high-rise condo called “The Situation,” visits a resort called “The Unique” for his trysts under a fake name, and hangs out in his neighbourhood, “Privilege Bay”. This is, much like Dubai itself, hardly subtle. But it’s not meant to be; after all, Dubai may exist in a desert, but it wasn’t constructed, ideologically or metaphorically, in a vacuum.

One key theme underlying The Dog is how, at the end of the day, expatriates are most frequently the victims of their own delusions. Dubai is the perfect setting for this sort of exploration, given that there is no permanence or stability; at any given point in time, work visas can be revoked, individuals off-loaded, lives turned upside down.

X is drawn into contemplating this sort of turmoil when a diving buddy of his goes missing under mysterious circumstances. Has he drowned, X wonders? Or is he, as the expat circle would have it, happily married to a second wife, living in a different Emirate having shucked his previous skin and taken on a new one altogether? And how, we see X trying to figure out, is it possible to so completely reinvent oneself, to transform from a devoted husband into a two-timing sneak? More importantly, how can you consider yourself a good man if you are perpetually placed within a system that is based on exploitation, on carnality, on superficiality, and most importantly, on a mind-set that is so alien that it might as well originate in another galaxy?

The complications faced by X will resonate with anyone who has moved to or indeed spent more than a brief transit period in Dubai. In all fairness, it is not, as X notes, “anybody’s fault that, until very recently [Dubai] has always been an uneventful, materially poor, culturally static corner of the world.” It certainly isn’t the former any more, although arguments could be made that culturally speaking, the Emirate seems to have regressed dramatically.

O’Neill is unsparing of the sheer silliness that pervades the expatriate community in Dubai, all of whom are by turns enraptured by the lives that they lead. But he is also equally merciless when it comes to skewering the locals, the young men who sit around in shopping malls with multiple cell-phones in an effort to demonstrate just how busy and important they are; or the monochromatic greys (charcoal, dove, olive, etc.) that seem to be colour scheme of choice for any building in Dubai that wants to be taken seriously.

This could get boring pretty quickly. O’Neill’s a great stylist though, and his narrator is so absurdly pedantic and also so perpetually aggravated, that it’s hard to not enjoy the sheer melodrama that X creates for himself.

There are, of course, moments in the book when you may find yourself wishing that both O’Neill and X would just get on with things already. But for the most part, the balance between the macrocosm of Dubai and the microcosm of X’s relationship with the Batroses is exquisitely maintained. As things turn dark for X, O’Neill simultaneously pulls away more and more of the curtains behind which the many traumas of being an expatriate are concealed.

As X finds the memories of his past life continuing to collide with his present, and his employers seem to get progressively more insane and demanding (with good reason, it would appear), The Dog begins to pick up in pace, hurtling towards what one hopes is a major denouement. X finds that there really is no such thing as a free lunch; that all the rubber-stamped indemnities in the world can’t stand up to insane billionaires with private HSBC cash machines in their houses, and that at the end of the day, even a faithful dog can be put down for the sake of its master.

Although the closing of O’Neill’s novel is more anti-climactic than anything else, it still somehow works, and makes you wonder ... what next?

The Dog

(NOVEL)

By Joseph O’Neill

Pantheon Books, USA

ISBN 978-0307378231

256pp.