Zoology and adult fiction make poor pen-mates. Animal stories (think Beatrix
Potter) work wonderfully for young readers because children have a lot in
common with our furred, feathered and four-legged friends. Both howl, bite
and tend to crap all over the carpet. A present bestseller in the children's
section is the “Walter the Farting Dog” series. We are not talking Julian
Barnes.
Nonetheless two new novels - Firmin by Sam Savage and The Wolf by
Joseph Smith - confirm that there is rich potential in the Animal Novel for
Adults (ANA). Animals, of course, figure as background in narrative as far
back as storytelling goes. Homer, I would bet, was a dog lover. Why else
would he stretch plausibility by having Argos, the hound, recognise its
master when he returns, in disguise, to Ithaca after 20-plus years? That
geriatric pooch's feebly wagging tail is one of the finer touches in Western
literature.
This country has always had a soft spot for animals. It's not always admired.
As Vladimir Nabokov once sourly observed, the English always feel sorrier
for the blind man's dog than the blind man. A random sweep through the great
pet shop of English literature turns up many examples to bear out Nabokov's
snidery.
Among Chaucer's pilgrims, for example, is the Prioress, who (negligent as she
doubtless is to Lazarus at her gate):
... had some little dogs, too,
that she fed
On roasted flesh, or milk and
fine white bread.
But sore she'd weep if one of
them were dead,
Or if men smote it with a rod
to smart.
I see that Abbess every day, walking her “little dogs”, in Regent's Park,
glaring balefully at the dog-beating sex.
Robinson Crusoe, on his island, has a pet parrot. But his real pet has two
legs and is called Man Friday. Jane Austen was, I apprehend, no animal
lover. The preposterous Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park has a pug
called, banally, “Pug”. So indifferent to the hound she has created is Miss
Austen (whose shoes may, perhaps, once have been piddled on) that she
forgets what Pug's sex is. No lavish subscription to the Canine Protection
Society from Chawton, Hants, one suspects.
For the honour of the sex, Virginia Woolf clearly did like animals and with Flush
created the first feminist animal story with a picture of the world as
seen through the eyes of the cocker spaniel owned by the poetess Elizabeth
Barrett Browning. Rudyard Kipling's Boots in Thy Servant, a Dog - the
first talking canine in literature - has a harder life. But that's the way
the dog biscuit crumbles.
One could write a whole book about Dickens and animals. The Copperfields' Jip
is asthmatic and “spoiled” - but faithful unto death. Jip expires (wheezily
barking, doubtless, “it is a nobler thing I do than dog has ever done”)
after his mistress dies in childbirth. Semper fidelis. David is less
faithful, and lives on to marry Agnes. Dickens did not much like cats. The
Cats Protection Society could take out a class-action suit over the
depiction of the horrific Lady Jane, Krook's cat, in Bleak House.
Hardy not only loved animals, he felt their pain as if it were his own.
Suffering animals are everywhere in his fiction, most prominently in Jude
the Obscure, with its lingeringly slaughtered pigs and horribly ensnared
rabbits. Their hurt counterpoints that of the ever-hurting hero.
Public bar myth in Dorset has it that the novelist's heart (destined for
burial the next day in his native Wessex) was accidentally left out and
eaten by his cat, Cobweb. Hardy would have forgiven the beast (legend has it
that the undertaker was less forgiving, and wrung poor Cobweb's neck).
It was a novelist, Vernon Lee, who invented the term “empathy” - the key
element in all the best ANAs. Kipling's Jungle stories, for all their
zoological intricacy, lack empathy. Mowgli is King of the Jungle because he
is never anything but a Man in Wolf's clothing. And a terrible bully.
Empathy - what it actually is to be an animal - takes off with Black Beauty.
Anna Sewell's “Autobiography of a Horse: Translated from the Original
Equine” gives animals (inherently “dumb”) a voice. It's a daring device. And
preposterous. Empathetic as it is, Black Beauty is also preachy in an
obnoxiously high Victorian way. “We horses,” Black Beauty piously
instructs the human reader, “do not mind hard work if we are treated
reasonably.” Amen. And bollocks.
In Tolstoy's Story of a Horse, his riposte to Sewell, his neutered colt
inquires: “Why - if you claim to love horses - do you chop our testicles
off?” Which translates as: if we really love serfs, why do we deny them the
freedoms we serf-owners have? The gelding shears are invisible in Sewell's
story although, from his docility, one presumes they have snipped off poor
BB's horsehood.
In the 20th century, the ANA has largely followed two styles. One is the
Aesopian Fable - in which animal narratives allegorise human society. Two
classics in the allegorical style are The Wind in the Willows (middle-class
chaps biff stoaty oiks; Edwardian England can sleep safely) and Animal
Farm (communism stinks).
The second mode aims, realistically, to represent the actuality of animal
existence. The pioneer text in this category is Jack London's Call of the
Wild, in which the pampered house dog, Buck, is dognapped and finds
himself hauling sleds in the snowy Yukon gold fields. Finally he breaks
loose to run with wolves. The last, magnificent, scene finds Buck howling
with the pack at the winter moon. Free, free at last.
Call of the Wild expresses its author's harshly Darwinian worldview.
London (whose nickname was “Wolf”) believed that all human beings must come
to terms with their inner animal. Was he a socialist? Jack was once asked.
Yes, he replied, in the same way that the caveman was a socialist. The title
(“Call of the Wild”) has been adopted by a company that organises stag
nights in Wales. Not quite what Jack London had in mind.
The Wolf belongs alongside London on the ANA shelf. It's an extended
interior monologue covering a day and a night's hunt in the life of a wolf.
It's written in stream of consciousness, translated - one assumes - from the
original lupine. It's convincing: assuming, that is, one can swallow the
improbability of a Wolf thinking loftily to itself, I am the wolf, the taker
of life; the predator. I attack with my eyes open and see death bright and
fierce in the glance of my prey. Give that alpha male an alpha for
eloquence.
Firmin is allegorical. And charming with it. A rat called Firmin (no
vermin, he) is littered in a dusty second-hand bookshop in run-down Scollay
Square in Boston (an actual location, just off the city's rat-infested
common). As rodents do, he munches any paper he comes across. His first meal
is Finnegans Wake - the “big one”. Firmin subsequently develops
(literally) a taste for high literature. Lettuce, he discovers, “tastes like
Jane Eyre”. Flaubert is “salty and tart”. Firmin becomes subtle as Proust in
the books he devours.
Meanwhile, the Boston around him is undergoing precinctification and
boulevardisation. There is no place in this gleaming new urban environment
for run-down bookshops. (Or books and booklovers, come to that.) No more
than a well-run metropolis, with its eye on property taxes, welcomes rats.
As an afterword tells us, charming run-down Scollay Square, and its
bookshops, fell to the wrecker's ball. Rats.
Both The Wolf and Firmin are prettily illustrated. Firmin is
actually gnawed round the edges. I haven't gone that far. But I enjoyed Sam
Savage's book (a pen-name, surely?) more than any work of light fiction I've
read in 2008. It's exactly a century since The Wind in the Willows
was published: let's give Firmin the Mr Toad Commemorative Prize for a
really excellent ANA.
Firmin by Sam Savage
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £10.99 Buy
the book
The Wolf by Joseph Smith
Jonathan Cape, £10 Buy
the book
Five animal favourites
1. Rab and his Friends by John Brown (1855)
The best canine story of the Victorian period. Rab is an Edinburgh mastiff, a
working dog, “as big as a highland bull”. But cuddlier.
2. Lobo the King of Currumpaw by Ernest Thompson Seton (1899)
Story of a supernaturally cunning wolf. Seton was a favourite author of
Baden-Powell, and a lot of the “wolf-pack” stuff in the Boy Scout code came
from him and Kipling.
3. Bambi: A Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten (1923)
Forget the syrupy movie, for whose rights Disney paid a paltry sum, only to
make a travesty of Salten's story of a deer's complicated life in the Tyrol.
First published in Austria, it can be read as an allegory on the
anti-Semitism exemplified by Adolf Hitler at the time.
4. A Boy and his Dog by Harlan Ellison (1969)
Post-nuclear apocalypse Vic survives with his mutated, wisecrackingly
talkative, dog, Blood. They communicate telepathically and dine
cannibalistically. Made into an excellent movie in 1975.
5. Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan (2003)
Graphic lion's-eye novel depicting the bombed city of Baghdad, during the Iraq
war. Based on fact - the city zoo's animals did escape. Best work of fiction
(so far) to come out of this sorry episode.
