Ella in Europe and Travels with Macy
By Michael Konik, Delacourte Press, 2005
By Bruce Fogel, Ebury Press, 2006, respectively

I don’t get people who travel with dogs. Traveling with kids is difficult enough, and I really can’t understand why you’d want to drag along a traveling companion who can’t even tell you that he needs a rest stop when you could just leave him at home in a kennel. But lots of people apparently like to take their canine companions with them on the road, from retired couples in motorhomes with their precious, furry bundles to professional journalists with their trusty, panting sidekicks. Dog travel narratives have even become a vigorous literary subgenre, the most famous example of which is John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, in which the celebrated author recounts his journey around America in a pickup truck with his faithful poodle by his side. The appearance of two new dog-voyage books on the nonfiction shelves at the same time illustrates just how vital the travel-with-dog market still is all these years later.

These two new books are quite different, especially from a geopolitical point of view. Michael Konik’s Ella in Europe is extremely doggie focused, as it is concerned primarily with the relationship between man and dog and the cultural differences they experience vis a vis the man-and-dog relationship on a different continent. Bruce Fogel’s Travels with Macy, on the other hand, strives to be a much more thoughtful travel narrative. Fogel, a Canadian expatriate who has lived in England for more than three decades, decides to return to North America in the topsy-turvy climate of the early twenty-first century just to see how much things have changed since he last lived here. He decides to recreate Steinbeck’s journey around America, and he decides to take his golden retriever, Macy, with him, well, because Steinbeck took his dog with him.

Konik’s book is fluffy and sweet. He begins by recalling his lifelong relationships with dogs and how they all ended in heartbreak when the dogs came to the ends of their lives. Then he remembers how he met Ella, and how she has become his best friend in the whole world. He manages to work himself into a monumental depression as he considers that Ella won’t be around forever, and it is in that spirit that he resolves to give Ella a present and take her on a grand tour of the great European cities.

Konik’s account of the trip is, as Fogel suggested when he contemplated the American mentality, “sappy and sentimental and naive.” Konik really, really, really loves his dog, and he gushes over Ella constantly. His observations of Prague, Vienna, Florence, Paris, et al concentrate mainly on their remarkable tolerance of dogs in comparison to American cities; his is a book-length summary of European leash laws and willingness to allow dogs into restaurants and onto buses and trains. His travel writing is solid but not terribly introspective, the stuff of newspaper travel sections. The thing is, though, that Konik’s sincere sentimentality is infectious, and one cannot help being moved by his devotion to his dog and his general good nature.

Fogel, by contrast, is all business. He is set, obviously, on a journey of social commentary, a hard look at America by an Englishman and his dog. His trip around the country in a vintage motorhome is peppered with little vignettes and multitudinous encounters with colorful characters, and Macy figures only peripherally into the story. All the little tidbits are engaging enough, but sometimes Fogel’s observations are a bit hard to grasp (such as when he describes a truck driver as having been “dressed by Sears rather than Wal-Mart”). At other times, he is painfully obvious (such as when, on arrival, he spies a fat squirrel and compares it to fat Americans). The capper, however, is when he decides that he loves America when he reaches Santa Fe, New Mexico; the area is undeniably on of the most beautiful in America, but the supposedly clear-eyed Fogel falls for the city’s tourist facade and its new-agey schtick.

To both authors’ credit, they understand that a journey of thousands of miles is not necessarily, no matter how much we anthropomorphize, an enjoyable experience for a dog. Both acknowledge that their canine pals probably would have preferred to stay at home. That acknowledgment makes Konik, who took Ella along out of love, seem like a much kinder human being, sappy though he may be, than Fogel, who had his dog in tow simply to make himself feel like John Steinbeck.

Copyright 2006 Ad Media Inc.