In his first book, Looking For a Fight, David Matthews got inside the real world of boxing the hard way, by turning himself into a fighter. In Man Buys Dog, he takes a slightly less risky inside track to another sport with a mixed reputation. He blows £2,500 of his publisher’s and agent’s money on an inadequate greyhound nicknamed Kevin and follows its career at Walthamstow, my local track and the finest dog-racing stadium known to man or beast. The book reminds me of many a Kevin I have backed at the ’Stow. It cracks out of the starting traps, an eye-catching blur of colour. But it ends up in a tangle of dog and broken dreams at the bend.

Matthews, a black East End boy gone West, starts from the well-founded suspicion that the dogs are “a victim of the ‘chav’ witch-hunts of the early 21st century, the marginalisation of the white-bread working classes and their associated end-of-the-pier-show lifestyle”. He shows some disdain for the animal-rights lobby, which, fresh from success over fox-hunting and hare-coursing, now has the bloodless sport of greyhound racing in its sights. (“I love animals, I really do. I especially love to eat them.”) Yet as Kevin and Matthews’s fortunes at the dogs plummet, his own prejudices about “dog people” come to the surface. He ends up complaining that people don’t really care about animals, because even the Walthamstow dog-lovers eat steak. He cites John Gray, arch reactionary philosopher, on how the notion that people are above animals is a modern “aberration”. Matthews’s change of mood seems to confirm that the more bitter and misanthropic one becomes about humanity, the more likely one is to indulge in anthropomorphic fantasies about animals.

Matthews turns greyhound racing and gambling into a metaphor for a society he claims is going to the dogs. After a night out at bingo with his Mum, he declares Britain “a nation of losers”. He claims that betting on the dogs drove him to Gamblers Anonymous, among losers “who manifest the compulsive behaviour that seems to be all-pervasive in Western society”. Yet he is scathing about the ease with which people become addicted to anything, and his own short-lived addiction reads more like a plot device than a serious problem.

“The track,” he complains, “affords adults the opportunity to act like children.” A greyhound track, like a football ground, is, indeed, the home stadium of the id — the emotional, irrational side of the psyche — where we can bawl and shout and generally behave in a way that we would not elsewhere. Matthews’s mistake is to mix that up with real life. “

If the dog is shit,” he says, “you are shit.” But as I always tell mates who rail too bitterly against some losing mutt: “They’re only dogs. They don’t know they are supposed to win.”

Where a book such as Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch interwove personal biography with his lifelong passion for football, Man Buys Dog is a book about a man who affects an interest in greyhound racing in order to write a book about it. In one of many moments of self-awareness, Matthews suggests that it is time to “stop this life-imitating-art-participatory-gonzo-journalism bullshit”.

You bet.

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