Publisher: Hodder Headline Australia
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 073361230X

Jenny Pausacker’s Sundogs is the fourth and final novel in her Central Secondary College series; four books linked by the characters’ attendance at the fictional inner city Melbourne high school, all in their final year of secondary schooling. The first of the series, What Are Ya?, originally published in 1987, has been described by Sydney Academic John Stephens as "extremely fine, and unfortunately neglected". The subsequent books in the series, Mr Enigmatic and Getting Somewhere have fared rather better in the public arena; Mr Enigmatic won the Ethel Turner prize in the 1995 NSW Premier’s Awards (not 1996 as the current jacket states), and Getting Somewhere was shortlisted in the 1996 CBCA Older Readers Awards. I for one hope and expect that Sundogs will receive similar recognition.

Sundogs is the most mature books in the series, both in content, in the way Pausacker handles the content and themes of her book, in the structure, which is in its subtlety the most complex of the four books, and in the bearing of her two main characters. It’s a difficult book to talk about in terms of plot without giving too much away; and that would be a grave error on my part as a reviewer, for a great deal of the power of the book comes from the gentle and painful revealing of the layers of the stories of Rhett and Zan.

We’ve met these two before; Rhett was, of course, Mr Enigmatic himself, his story in that novel told through the pieces written for his VCE English portfolio, and from the notes exchanged between himself and his English teacher. Zan had a smaller role to play; she’s Barb O’Connell’s younger sister, a bit-part player in What Are Ya? who emerges fully formed and re-named; known as Sue in What Are Ya?, she now prefers to be called by the second half of her name, Suzanne.
Zan and Rhett come unwittingly and unwillingly together on their respective enforced family holidays. Both are brittle, suspicious, and cynical, and steer a clear path of each other until the night they are stranded together in a bush cave. It’s then that they reveal themselves to each other, and find the first fragile steps along the road to recovery from their respective grief.

The structure of the novel plays beautifully to support its theme. As each of the main characters must face up to the truth of their experience, Pausacker allows their stories to come out gradually. In Zan’s case, her story is revealed to the reader in painful installments as she tells the story to herself over and over again, "to see if she could make it end some other way". We only get sporadic clues about Rhett’s story until he tells it in its entirety to Zan in the bush cave; a reflection both of his inability to face his grief, and of the greater tragedy he has lived through.

But the night in the bush cave isn’t the end of the journey for Rhett and Zan — indeed, the point of the book is that there is no real end to some journeys. Rhett copes in his usual fashion by buggering off for seven months; Zan returns to the scene of her humiliation and loss — school — where she rebuilds her dignity and confidence, ready to help Rhett through the rest of his journey on his return. It’s no insignificant thing, either, that the novel begins in Autumn; chilly and bleak, and finishes in Spring; the season of renewal.

Email to Jenny Pausacker from Judith Ridge.
Dear Jenny,
I've just this second finished Sundogs — in fact, I still have tears on my lashes! I think it's wonderful, and I'm so looking forward to writing about it.
I think it affected me so deeply because of all the "rights of passage" which the Central Secondary College books have dealt with, grief seems to me to be the most adult one (at least, the way you've approached it in Sundogs) and for me at the moment very pertinent and close to my heart. There's been a lot of illness and death and separation around me this last year; I’ve been to four funerals, and my mother has been treated for a cancer we initially thought was terminal. Friends’ marriages have broken down. And I thought about all those losses when I read about Rhett and Zan. There, I'm crying again!
I'm so glad you didn't wrap it all up. I'm so glad this book was about the PROCESS and the learning over and over again. Rhett and Zan are still healing at the end of the book; Rhett in particular easily slides back into the fear and grief, and it’s clear that he’s going to keep on doing that. It’s clear also that Maureen may never recover from her loss. It's so important that we understand that. I’m so pleased that the book is open about this on-going process.
I am also so impressed with how the four Central Secondary College books fit together — not like a jigsaw, more like a series of bridges — and I wonder how much of that was planned along the way? Mick's depression was pre-empted in Mr Enigmatic — did you know at the time that you'd come back to it? Did you intend back with What Are Ya? to write more novels set in that world? And if you DIDN’T at that stage, when and why did you decide to write inter-connected books rather than four totally distinct novels?

Email to Judith Ridge from Jenny Pausacker
Hi, Judy.
Yes, grief is very much the theme of Sundogs — the times when kids have to deal with what we think of as adult experiences, which is why at the end Rhett and Zan talk about feeling separated off from some of their friends, who haven't had those "adult experiences" yet. I was touched to find out that you were able to connect your experiences and theirs so directly — maybe because age doesn't have a particularly significant effect on the experience of grief or maybe because young adults experience it in an unmediated, first-time way that can be quite useful for adults to remember?
The process of grief is the other part of the novel that I was holding my breath about. I don't believe that really important experiences — and really important losses — are ever finished... but tidy resolutions are such a part of fiction that I wondered whether readers would feel baffled when I brought Rhett and Zan down from the hills and sort of started all over again. However, nobody's complained so far, so I'm hoping that the structure of the novel really does convey what I want it to convey.
Writing the novels as a series started because I was worried that What Are Ya? would disappear without a trace. It was one of the first Oz YA novels, just before Beyond the Labyrinth and So Much To Tell You carved out a niche for the genre, so it was published in a not-children, not-adult imprint by Angus and Robertson, which accordingly didn't travel very far. But I've always loved tangential sequels — and I also love large casts of characters, so the series idea was a great way to give depth to the minor characters — and within two seconds of linking What Are Ya? with Mr Enigmatic, I realised that I wasn't just following a bunch of characters; I was trying to identify the big issues for young adults, as I see them. Once I'd written about love in Mr Enigmatic, I could see that the next step was to write about work in Getting Somewhere. And I knew years ago that I also had to write about kids confronting the tough stuff... but I kept putting Sundogs off, although in the end it wrote itself like a dream, probably because I was ready for it by then. Plus, although people tend to describe What Are Ya? as "your lesbian novel", I see it as a book about all the choices young adults suddenly have to make, after being told for years to "wait till you grow up". So What Are Ya? and Sundogs are like book ends, novels on more complicated and atypical themes, with Freud's classic love and work dualism in the middle...