
However commonplace the shapes in which it may become incarnate, health always has a strong, attractive influence on man. And the fact is, Niki's story is hardly more than a faithful account of her health. And we are now dealing with a period in Niki's life when the charm of youth reinforced that condition of health which, even by itself, is so seductive; a period, in short, when what pleases us is precisely that quality which is, in reality, still wanting, to wit the imminent perfection of body and mind. The awkward and exaggerated movements which sometimes miss their aim and make us smile; the avid curiosity which sends the nose questing into everything, but ready to be withdrawn with a sneeze of alarm; the awkwardness, clumsiness, excessive freedom sometimes manifest and all symbolic of the strength and suppleness to come - all these things compose a spectacle so reassuring that even experience and embittered age may well see in it a denial of its pessimistic prophesyings.
A thing I didn't expect when we got our dog was how much pleasure and pride I would take in his prowess - his strength and speed and nimbleness, not to mention the joy he radiates when showing them off (Blake: "Exuberance is beauty"); I'm like a dad at sports day. People talk a lot about a dog's mental or emotional qualities (gentleness, loyalty, obedience, or their contraries) but in the end it's mostly a physical thing. Dogs are unselfconscious about their movements, their bodies, to an inhuman degree; perhaps that make us more conscious of those things - filling the gap the dogs have left. In any case, we love them for it. Among people, physical affection - that is, affection for the body, as well as expressed with the body - so often gets muddled up with sex; our love of dogs can be purer than that (but some time we're going to have to talk about J. R. Ackerley).
At the heart of Niki is the most authentic fictional account that I've read of a dog's body, and the effect it has on humans. (The Call of the Wild is good on Buck's transformation from pampered housepet to überwolf, but necessarily over-dramatized.) The book is also a sharp political allegory. It was first published in Hungary in 1956, shortly before the revolution and Soviet intervention, and set a few years before, during the early days of Communist rule. Niki's owners, the Ancsas, are loyal party members, and Mr. Ancsa's enthusiasm for the new state, and for the role he plays as an engineer in its building, is explicitly compared to Niki's enthusiasm for life; the loving discipline they impose on her is contrasted with the harsher, more arbitrary role of the party in their lives:
The abuse of power, baleful vice of kings, leaders, dictators, directors, heads of departments, secretaries, shepherds, cowherds, and swineherds, heads of families, pedagogues, elder brothers, of old and young in what authority so-ever, this stench, this sickness, this source of infection, peculiar to man and unknown to any other carnivore, even the bloodiest, this curse and blasphemy, this war and cholera, was a thing unknown in the Ancsas' house. No pointless constraint was placed on Niki's freedom.
Mr. Ancsa vanishes - to prison, his wife eventually discovers. With his departure, Niki's abundant health begins to fade, her decline a commentary on the slow death of her masters' ideals, their hope, and perhaps more than a commentary: dogs take so much of their feeling from us; perhaps the death of hope is what kills Niki.
This is the 1961 Penguin edition (the only one I know of) - drawing by Barry Driscoll. For comparison, here is the cover of the current New York Review Books edition:

Wrong dog - Niki is supposed to be a pure white fox terrier with brown ears - but it gets the spirit rather better than Driscoll, whose drawing is in a tacky English tradition of comically pathetic dogs. Same translation as the Penguin, by Edward Hyams (a very interesting character - novelist, journalist, historian of wine, gardening, political assassination and terrorism, anti-nuclear campaigner, pioneering ecologist. He wrote several books on soil, in particular the failure of fertility: A Prophecy of Famine was co-written with H. J. Massingham, who I'll talk about some time).
My Penguin copy set me back 99p plus p&p on eBay, which turns out to be a bargain: six or seven quid is usual, and there are sharks out there trying to pretend it's a rarity and charging £15 and up. The NYRB, with an introduction by the excellent George Szirtes, may be better value.
Post dedicated to Tim Dee, who introduced me to Niki, and who had a birthday last week. Many happy etc.