I Have Heard You Calling In The Night

One afternoon in the early 1980s, glassily browsing the Glasgow Herald, Thomas Healy spotted a listing offering Dobermann pups for sale. He was pushing 40 and, as was his custom, drunk. Hours later, after an encounter with a shady dog-dealer, and not quite sure why, he found himself owner of a puppy. It was to be the most important thing he had done in years.

I Have Heard You Calling In the Night is Healy's tale of redemption, of partial redemption at least. Having spoken to a few people who have read this memoir, they all approached it with caution – a tale of a bar-brawling drunk saved by a puppy and, later, religion? Sounds like it could be a maudlin and sentimental read. Yet Healy has a snappy, forthright style that draws you in after only a page or two. He is never preachy and avoids self-deprecating wisecracks.

The puppy acquired the unlikely name Martin, sharing a small house in a rough corner of Glasgow with Healy, his mother and sister. As the dog grew, Healy began to feel an unexpected sense of responsibility and it was this, not the after-hours injuries, the police cells or the failure of his ambition to write for a living, that began to sober him. Unexpectedly, it was not a troubled childhood which had sent Healy skidding in the wrong direction, though losing his father in his early teens didn't help. Growing up in an environment where it was difficult to be an idealistic, intelligent child was a problem, and Healy was soon compensating; by his mid-20s he had become a hardened drinker, unpleasant company, quick to fight.

Much of the book describes the adventures of man and dog – working together as security guards, or on annual treks to caravan parks, sometimes scuppered by lapses into drinking. Healy is intensely affected by any pain felt by his pet, and his struggles against the failing health of both Martin and his mother are bitterly recounted. His relationships with women are another focus of the book's sadness: more, I suspect, than he realises. Drawn strongly to the company of women, he never quite connects or commits, especially when he has the excuse of the dog – his absolute priority.

Healy has previously published two novels, and a book on boxing. His writing life is skimmed over however (much of it happened since the events here), though he recounts an uneasy and irregular attachment to religion, from his teenage desire to escape to an Israeli kibbutz, to Christmas services with his mother, to a pledge against drink which sees him, where the book ends in the mid '90s, on a ten-day retreat at an abbey, tempted by the monastic life, but still too drawn by people, and by the human ties of pride and doubt.