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LOVE ON THE ISLE OF DOGS | Jude Cowan Montague by Eze Chimalio The writer, broadcaster and artist Jude Cowan Montague has created a ‘colourful’ and somewhat mournful beauty in this personal memoir of hers. Married in the early 1990’s in a swoon of adventure, butterflies, romance, poetry and pleasure, the tide soon becomes impossible and difficult to manage as pregnancy popped large and her husband’s cortex convulsed and began to malfunction due to what is thankfully today seen as part of modern life as opposed to taboo in the climes of the days gone by. We are talking mental illness here. The sheer stress of this unfortunate development had an adverse effect for both. Their pathing of ways had within it a trauma that dominated their lives for most of the ensuing decade. It is those blues and soulful events that has influenced this story of love, loss, care, promise and redemption. I found the title of the book quite seductive, which, in itself betrays my enduring interest in all matters of love, sex, the bush and dirty business but I am glad the story did not indulge my proclivities, it rather takes its order and ink out of kind of weighed chaos and melancholia. Here we are led through a green screen of changing visions of the early 1990’s Docklands. The dramatic changes taking place in the area including Canary Wharf whose whole scale destruction and reconstitution embodied the hopes and frustrations of trying to build a family life for the twenty-something protagonist and her other half. In the illustrations that support the words in LOVE IN THE ISLE OF DOGS, the isle is a Neverland, a theme park of sorts where memories are tinted and tinged with worry, fear, loathing, a top where turns are laced with care, intelligence, love, longing and a spirited desire and determination of a pregnant and later young mother trying to navigate life’s troubled water, not Thames. The mind is a flower that can easily be disturbed and destroyed but can always bloom to surprising heights and light and in that we have hope and thank God. Jude’s summit and survival through the chords and changes of life is delicately captured in this enterprising and youthful summary of time passed. It is open, annoying (in a good way), playful, honest and sincere giving this non-sequential anatomy of time a plus especially for all those who trust and believe that power is love supreme.