Archive for ‘animal creatures’

« Older Entries  |  
April 11, 2013

James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen

(On the question of dogs vs cats in literature, this might be relevant)

From last weekend’s column:

**********************************************

Recently Maria Popova of the website BrainPickings brought the existence of a children’s book by Sylvia Plath to the internet’s attention. The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit tells the story of a little boy called Max who comes into possession of the perfect suit. It’s always a little strange, and rather nice, to find literary figures known for their writing for adults show that they could be pretty good children’s writers as well. Like many people I was introduced to Ted Hughes not through his poetry, but his children’s books The Iron Man and (this one was a little after my time) The Iron Woman. And James Joyce wrote two children’s books- The Cat and the Devil and, published for the first time last year along with illustrations by Casey Sorrow, The Cats of Copenhagen.

Both of these books are in the form of letters sent to Joyce’s grandson Stephen—there was some controversy upon the book’s publication over whether all of Joyce’s writings or only those previously published, belonged in the public domain once the copyright had expired in 2012.

Apparently, along with The Cat and the Devil Joyce had sent Stephen a toy cat filled with sweets, a filling of which the grown-ups in Stephen’s life would probably have disapproved. The first lines of The Cats of Copenhagen are possibly an apology for his inability to send another cunningly concealed cache of candy: “Alas! I cannot send you a Copenhagen cat because there are no cats in Copenhagen”.

Joyce appears to have loved cats. There’s an episode in Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom, also clearly a cat person, feeds and speaks lovingly to his pet, who answers with an evocative “mkgnao!”, far more catlike than the more traditional “meow”. It’s fitting that he should have dedicated two books to the creatures. Children’s literature is full of faithful hounds and naughty pups. Cats (except in rare works like Anushka Ravishankar’s I Like Cats) tend to get short-changed; the only iconic figure they have is Puss-in-Boots.

If there are no cats in Copenhagen, Joyce’s book seems to suggest that the city would be vastly improved by the introduction of some. The Copenhagen invoked here is a city in thrall to its policemen, who sit at home reading and smoking in bed and drinking buttermilk (how does one apply for this job? I am very well qualified), sending out boys in red to carry out their orders. Meanwhile the citizens depend entirely on these orders, apparently lacking the ability to do such basic things as cross roads without instructions.

Casey Sorrow’s art lends another layer to this odd little account of the city. There are no cats, we’re told; but Sorrow’s illustrations are full of them. Cats crossing roads, cats on bicycles, policeman-cats lying in bed and gorging themselves. Is the author lying to his grandson? Would cats, were they introduced to the city, behave like humans? What does it mean to be a cat?

A cat, of course, being independent sort of creature, can “cross a road without any instructions from a policeman”. There’s an element of anarchy in the book’s proposed plan, which is to introduce cats to the city so that they may teach by example, render the policemen obsolete, and eat fish. Copenhagen, we’re told, has many fish.

Joyce’s insistence on the city’s abundance of fish has created, for me, a nice little linguistic mystery. “There are lots and lots of fish/ and bicycles but/ there are no cats,” he says. For most people the bringing together of fish and bicycles will recall a famous feminist statement. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” was popularised by Gloria Steinem, but she credits it to the Australian writer Irina Dunn, in 1970. Long after Joyce, then; The Cats of Copenhagen was written in 1936. But Dunn in turn credits the fish-and-bicycle wording to an unnamed philosophical work; perhaps Joyce read the same book? Or the whole thing is a complete coincidence.

**********************************************

Posted in animal creatures, language, Left of Cool | 1 Comment »

April 3, 2013

Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin

I discovered after I’d written this that Kurkov was in India recently. I suppose that makes this topical.

There’s so much more to say about Death and the Penguin. People who know more about it than me could probably say a lot about the novel’s depiction of post-Soviet Ukraine (or people who know less about it but also have less of an aversion to the pontificating of ignorant foreigners).

I also found that the flat acceptingness of its characters’ reactions to the things that go on around them had one unexpected result–that I found myself reading it as a queer novel when this same attitude was extended to the relationships between its men. You have Misha non-penguin who has met Viktor only a couple of times arranging the death of a man only because Viktor’s quite proud of the piece he wrote on him. Sergey, who takes Viktor and his newfound charge into his home to celebrate an intimate Christmas, sitting together watching Sonya and Misha playing on the ice.

From this weekend’s column:

**********************************************

When Elizabeth Taylor died a couple of years ago, it was revealed that the principal writer of the New York Times obituary for the actress had in fact predeceased her by quite a few years. This was the first time, I suspect, that many readers had come across the practice of publications keeping obituaries of important people ready, and updating them occasionally.

When Viktor, a failed writer in Kiev, gets a job writing these premature obituaries for a newspaper, things seem to be going very well for him. He may not have the immediate satisfaction of seeing his work in print (his subjects remain stubbornly healthy at first) but he has a steady job and is making extra money from freelance work. He also meets and befriends a militiaman named Sergey and forms a bond with the daughter of one of his clients. Until this point Viktor’s only companion has been a rather unusual pet.

Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin begins with a joke. A military man sees a subordinate standing with a penguin and orders him to take it to the zoo. Later, seeing the same man with the same penguin, he asks why his orders were not obeyed. But he did take the penguin to the zoo, says the subordinate, and to the circus, and now the pair are on their way to the cinema.

Within the novel, the presence of a king penguin within Viktor’s household is given a plausible, if not particularly likely, explanation. Apparently the Kiev zoo can no longer afford to keep all its animals and has distributed them among citizens who are willing to take them. Hence Misha, who spends a great deal of time staring at himself in the mirror, and enjoys cold baths (he comes “plip-plopping” at the sound of running water) and fish.

Yet soon the subjects of Viktor’s columns begin to die in mysterious circumstances; one of them “fell from a sixth-floor window – was cleaning it for some reason, apparently, though it wasn’t his. And at night”.  A man who has occasionally given him work disappears, leaving Viktor in charge of his daughter, Sonya. Various threatening figures seem to be taking an interest in Viktor and he and Sonya are forced to go into hiding. And who is the mysterious plump young man who seems to be collecting information about him?

On the surface Death and the Penguin could easily be a crime thriller. But Kurkov is less interested in the events of the plot (who is killing these people? why? how are the breaking into Viktor’s home and leaving him money?) than he is in Viktor himself, an ordinary man caught in increasingly absurd circumstances. George Bird’s translation captures much of the book’s willingness to play with the genre. On the first page itself we get the dramatic “a shot rang out”, but the book will never tell us why or who fired it; instead Viktor writes a story about it and it is forgotten.

In addition there’s a curious flatness to these characters’ reactions to the strange and alarming things that are happening to them. Informed that his new friend is on the run from assassins, Sergey shrugs and invites Viktor to spend the holidays with him. Sonya hardly seems to notice her father’s disappearance. The only person who seems to react to his circumstances as you might expect is Misha the penguin who, apparently, has been diagnosed with depression, has heart trouble caused by being too long in the wrong climate, and is clearly lonely for the company of other penguins.

It’s the presence of Misha, usually to be found staring mournfully at Viktor, that gives Death and the Penguin more emotional power than one might at first credit it with. This is an accomplished, bleakly funny story of a man in an increasingly absurd world, but with a heartbroken penguin at its centre it is also something more.

**********************************************

(Image stolen shamelessly from here.)

Posted in animal creatures, Left of Cool | 2 Comments »

February 11, 2013

Two Owls and a Goat.

I’m never looking for anything in particular at the Delhi Bookfair, which is why my purchases always feel (to me) so unexpectedly entertaining. Among those I picked up this year were three Indian children’s books the covers of which featured, respectively, an owl, an owl and a goat. I like owls and goats.

The first was The Magic Feather by Roma Singh, published by Tulika Books. The owl on the cover is slightly misleading — though it plays an important role in the book it has very little screentime and no speaking lines. A little girl is looking for her friends. She tucks a fallen owl feather into her hair, and from then on, whatever she places in her hair leads her to a wonderful land. Eventually she reaches the land of books, where she finds her friends and they all read things.

What makes this is the art, which is a mixture of papercraft and simple, drawn-on colours, which makes for a sense of overlapping textures leaping off the page. The little girl’s hair is made of long strips of curling print, and birds, clouds, leaves are varieties of patterned paper. Some of the paper still bears text,  so that on the owl’s wings or the belly of a frog it is possible to read part of an article about construction work. It is so very pretty.

Owl Ball by Francesca Xotta was published by the National Book Trust and was not half as attractive as (though a fraction of the price of) The Magic Feather. The NBT can be frustrating if you like children’s books– there’s so much potential for greatness wasted for lack of funds and perhaps lack of care. I’d work for them (part-time only) for free if it meant better-edited books.

So, Owl Ball. It’s about an owl who lives in a park where children regularly dump junk food. Our protagonist eats these unhealthy things and grows fat. This causes the other animals in the park to bully him and call him names, including “kumbhakarna” and “football”; it becomes clear that in calling him “Owl Ball” the book is doing something similar. Owl Ball is too weak to defend himself from the bullies until he meets a little girl. She tells him he must become physically strong in order to stand up for himself. A strict programme of exercise follows but this is not enough. She must “turn Owl Ball into a normal owl … his behaviour also needs reformation”.

Now that he is strong, does Owl Ball defend himself from the bullies? Well, no, because they are impressed by his newfound slim handsomeness and do not taunt him anymore. Instead they all become friends. What Owl Ball has learnt is that his new friends are really a bunch of bullies to whose ideas he was forced to conform “excess of everything is bad”. Owl Ball  is a story about how children can protect themselves from being bullied by getting rid of whatever traits about them the bullies fixate upon — and that these bullies make desirable friends. And that being fat is the worst thing in the world. It was published in 2009.

The last of the three books was The Bravest Goat in the World, a story (incredibly) by former president Dr. Zakir Husain, translated by Samina Mishra and with illustrations by Pooja Pottenkulam. It’s published by Young Zubaan, and I bought it mainly for the combination of the title and this illustration, reproduced on the cover:

(Note: the goat in question does not have seven legs. That is merely her coat, though various people on twitter suggested that they might be udders).

Chandni is a goat, owned by a lonely man named Abbu Khan who keeps goats for company. All his previous goats have escaped and run to the mountains, as mountain goats cannot abide being chained; Chandni yearns to do the same. Eventually she breaks free, lives the life of a real goat, falls in love, and (spoiler warning!) … is killed by a wolf.

Which is the point at which in many books we’d learn that Chandni shouldn’t have left her nice safe home. Instead, The Bravest Goat in the World actively validates her choice. We’re told that she had lived “like a mountain goat”, that in fact “it was Chandni who had won in the end”. What we have is a book that upholds an idea of personal integrity as more important than anything else– certainly more important than safety; as far as morals in children’s books go this is one we really don’t see enough of. Our former president. There’s rather too much text on each page to make for perfection, but between the unusual, gory morality of the story and Pooja Pottenkulam’s adorably silly illustrations, I was completely charmed.

Posted in animal creatures, children's literature, delhi, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

January 30, 2013

Musharraf Ali Farooqi & Michelle Farooqi, Rabbit Rap

I found Rabbit Rap hard going the first time I read it a few months ago. It was easier when I reread it for this review, but it’s still a disappointing book. Particularly when one knows just how good a writer M.A.F really is. At least I was kinder* to it than Ashley Tellis?

A version of this review was published in this weekend’s Sunday Guardian.

 

**********************************************

A fantastic (and devoid of humans) world has reached a post-predatorial era. The uninhibited use of a pesticide called UB-Next has killed off many carnivores and driven away the rest. Meanwhile the Fishermen of Urban Lands (FOUL) have been using a laser-guided system to protect their fish, thus wiping out most species of birds of prey. The rabbits, who own most of the farms benefit the most from this state of affairs. Newfound prosperity and a freedom from predators leads to a number of changes in rabbit society—most significantly a move to above-ground dwellings that marks a huge cultural shift.

An uncritical supporter of this new way of life is Rabbit Hab, a farmer and chairman of the Lapin Alliance, who aspires to wealth and social success. He is befriended by Rabbit Fud, a director of the UB-Next company, and is persuaded to become an early adopter of the company’s new product, a fertiliser called Vegobese. He is also keen to move his extended family out of the warren and into modern housing, but is foiled in this by the cunning aged matriarch, Gran-Bunny-Ma. As these new chemical products have unintended effects and things grow more and more out of control, Rabbit Hab and Gran-Bunny-Ma find themselves on opposite sides of a social revolution.

It’s clear from the beginning that Musharraf Ali Farooqi and Michelle Farooqi’s Rabbit Rap is a work of satire. It’s not always clear what it is a satire of. Ecological issues? We have here the unchecked use of chemicals promoted by big agro-tech businesses causing huge changes in the flora and fauna of a place. Entire species are wiped out, and the food produced by these new methods is pale and tasteless. Capitalism in general? Important decisions are made over games of golf. As UB-Next’s products fail or come with unintended side-effects, they are repackaged as luxury brands, and impressive amounts of spin are applied to make exploding, or radioactive vegetables seem good. Revolutionary movements? The movement initiated by the young rabbit Freddy goes off the rails almost immediately, lacking focus and easily manipulated by a number of people with their own agendas. Is the target of the satire then modern society (“a fable for the 21st Century”, says the subtitle), and can so generalised a subject make for a successful satire? I’m not sure.

Surprisingly, the most sympathetic characters here are Freddy and Rabbit Hab himself. In their own ways, each is the innocent abroad, caught in the machinations of those around him. Both rabbits, though on opposite sides of the conflict, seem to believe sincerely in their respective causes, and neither of them appears capable of understanding the extent (all too clear to the reader) to which they are being manipulated. Rabbit Hab’s desires in life may be simple and material (an impressive-looking modern lifestyle, a less embarrassing family, a membership at a prestigious golf club) but they’re not particularly evil, and they’re easily understood. Freddy’s initial motive is an unattainable crush, yet even as he becomes first an acknowledged leader of the movement and then a scholar, he’s still easily made a fool of. The real political genius here is that of Gran-Bunny-Ma.

And there’s much to be said for the image of the seemingly weak, elderly lady scheming her way to the top by means of a more powerful understanding of the world she’s in. Just as there’s much to be said for the scenes in which Freddy interacts with the “NERD-bred” rabbits; a dynamic as influenced by 1950’s “JD” (juvenile delinquent) narratives as it is by the low slung jeans of Kids These Days (where “these days” are the mid-1990s, it’s all rather dated). But none of this is relevant, or leads to anything. Then there’s a joy in the wordplay where concepts are acronymised and inverted so that FRUMP and NERD are now desirable things to be. But a setting like this offers so much scope for linguistic play that the few instances we get merely serve to draw attention to a more general absence.

It’s too easy to dismiss a story about talking animals as silly or frivolous, unworthy of serious critique. But some of our best works of social commentary have employed animals to make their point. We don’t need to go back as far as Aesop’s Fables; the twentieth century has given us George Orwell’s Animal Farm and (more recently) Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Done well, political or social satire can be scathing and powerful, or at the very least clever. Rabbit Rap is content to be a silly book about rabbits, and I can’t help being disappointed.

**********************************************

* I don’t really believe that a critic’s being “kind” to books is a virtue.

Posted in animal creatures, Guardian20 | 4 Comments »

November 27, 2012

Some Peake

From here, Mervyn Peake’s original drawing for Irma Prunesquallor. Included in my copies of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, and for some reason on the cover of one of my copies of Titus Alone (in which the character does not appear).

Irma Prunesquallor

 

The Knitting Sheep

And the Knitting Sheep, from Peake’s illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s two Alice in Wonderland books. Long before I found a copy of the Peake-illustrated editions for myself, I saw this particular one in a Lewis treasury at a friend’s house. I may have shouted “Irma!”. Now that I see them side by side (or in this case one on top of the other) the differences are slightly more visible- including, obviously, the fact that one subject is a sheep and the other a human woman.

The sheep looks happier.

Posted in animal creatures, mervyn peake | Leave a Comment »

October 6, 2012

Chris Haughton, A Bit Lost

In last week’s Left of Cool column I talked about owls, poo and children’s books as detective manuals. I adored A Bit Lost, and I think I’ll be collecting Haughton’s future work.


**********************************************

 I rarely buy children’s picture books. But in the past year and a half I have bought four copies of Chris Haughton’s A Bit Lost (published as Little Owl Lost in the USA), replacing my copy of the book each time I’ve spontaneously given it away. Haughton’s art is what makes A Bit Lost so special. It’s very simple, with big areas of empty space that allow the reader to focus on the (surprisingly expressive) animals themselves. The colours are vibrant and improbable – the sky is olive green, the ground is blue, the trees move from a medley of oranges and reds in the day to shadowy purples at sunset. The animals are bright pinks and purples and greens.

Haughton tells the story of a baby owl who falls out of its nest while its (we’re not given any clues as to the baby owl’s gender) mother is asleep. It lands with a bump on the forest floor, and immediately sets about the search for its mother, aided by a helpful squirrel. Unfortunately, the baby owl’s ability to describe its mummy is limited. On being told that she is very big, the squirrel leads the baby owl to a bear. Hearing that she has pointy ears it suggests a hare, and “big eyes” lead it to suggest a frog. Luckily the frog is a bit smarter than the squirrel and is able to reunite the little family. Everyone goes back to the nest and eats biscuits to celebrate.

Obviously there’s nothing particularly original about this story. P. D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother was published more than fifty years ago and that book also tells the story of a baby bird wandering from animal to animal (and in some cases to inanimate objects) trying to find its mother. But then this is a story that is always going to resonate with young readers – many of us still remember the sheer terror of being small and outside the house and separated from a parent.

But there’s another reason this story works. This column has in the past mentioned Terry Pratchett’s Where’s My Cow?, a book-within-a-book about a man searching for his missing cow. In that book the protagonist’s search consists of approaching various farm animals (and a hippopotamus, for some reason), hearing the noises they make, and concluding that they are not his cow. Pratchett’s policeman character Sam Vimes reads the book to his son, and while doing so alters it so that the search for the cow turns into his son’s search for his daddy, by interrogating and eliminating the men he encounters in the city’s streets. It’s appropriate that Vimes is a policeman; Where’s My Cow? is a sort of police procedural.

And then there’s The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business, by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch. This children’s book, first published in German in 1989, is about a mole who wakes up to find that someone has pooped on his head. His search for the culprit consists of approaching each of his suspects (horses, rabbits and the like) and comparing their faeces to what is on his head before declaring them innocent. Eventually the dog is found to be the guilty party, and the mole gets his revenge.

Deductive reasoning consists of slowly eliminating possibilities – as Sherlock Holmes would have it, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. A Bit Lost, like the other books I mention here, is all about eliminating possibilities. Can this be my mummy? Is that my cow? Can this animal have defaecated upon my head? And in a way all books for young children are a form of detective fiction because it is though deduction that we discover what things are not, and therefore what they are, and how they (and we) fit into our world.

**********************************************


Posted in animal creatures, children's literature, Left of Cool | Leave a Comment »

September 27, 2012

Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, Pride of Baghdad

From last weekend’s Left of Cool column.

 

**********************************************

Dead or injured people are news; dead or injured animals are human interest. We’re acclimatised, to an extent, to violence against other people. It’s all over our newspapers, it’s part of our entertainment. Which is why, like many people, I can (upto a point) watch movies or read books in which human beings are tortured, mutilated, exploded, but an injured animal has me in tears.

In 2003 during the American invasion of Iraq, four lions escaped from the Baghdad zoo. They wandered about the city for some time. Eventually they were shot by U.S soldiers. The story received a great deal of international attention, and formed the basis of Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s graphic novel, Pride of Baghdad.

The most notable thing about Pride of Baghdad is Henrichon’s beautiful art. There’s a clever use of colour here, with a palette of oranges and reds to portray the destruction of the city. It’s a relief to us almost as much as to the lions when they encounter the green of forests or the cool blues of shadowy interiors.

The early sections in the zoo establish different animal species as having different temperaments, a fact that is illustrated when Noor, the younger lioness, is unable to negotiate an escape plan with an understandably nervous antelope. Other animals are less skittish; the monkeys are thuggish, dishonourable survivors, while the giraffes seem to believe in an apocalyptic religion (and the elephants are kindly but they’re dumb?). The lions, as protagonists, are less one-note. Noor romanticises the idea of freedom, while the older lioness Safa is more cynical. Zill, the adult male, is a pragmatist, while lion cub Ali acts as a sounding board for everyone else’s ideas.

It’s tempting to read into all of these positions a straight allegory of various attitudes towards war and freedom. It doesn’t help that Vaughan has his characters make pronouncements of the order “you have to earn freedom”. The subject matter ensures that the reader is already on high-alert for signs that this book is Really About the plight of Iraqi civilians during the war.

Even leaving aside the awkward implications of having animals potentially stand in for brown-skinned people, Pride of Baghdad is at its weakest when it attempts to anthropomorphise its characters. An example of this early in the book is when we learn why Safa is sceptical about the perfect freedom of the outside world. Safa is older and more experienced and might well be expected to understand that the world outside is a dangerous place. Instead, we’re shown that her caution stems from a gang rape by a group of lions in her youth. There’s a long tradition in mediocre writing of having traumatic rape substituted for female character development. It is depressing to see that even non-human female characters cannot escape this trope, particularly since lions in nature do not gang rape. Those are human crimes, and it is when Vaughan lets his characters act like lions picking their way through human civilisation that they seem most real.

But are the deaths of four lions really what we should be focusing on, compared with the larger horrors of the Iraq war? There’s a hint that Vaughan is alive to the problems of the choice to dwell on the (comparatively easier to stomach for an American audience) heroic story of a group of animals rather than the human tragedy of the citizens of the country upon which his own was waging war. After the death of the lions and the explanation that theirs was a true story we are presented with a full spread of Baghdad at night and the deadpan sentence “There were other casualties as well”. Which is all very well. But we are not reading of these other casualties, as they aren’t the stories the author has chosen to tell. If Vaughan wishes to draw attention to our proclivity to pay more attention to lions than to people, he has done so by writing an entire book about lions. He might want to rethink that strategy.

**********************************************


Posted in animal creatures, comics, Left of Cool | Leave a Comment »

May 4, 2012

Sheri S Tepper, The Waters Rising

I wanted to like The Waters Rising. Tepper’s book had been dismissed by practically everyone who had talked about it at all; I’d have liked to be the one to discover some brilliant, redeeming reading of the text, and one that would cause its inclusion in the Clarke award shortlist* to make sense to me.

Dan Hartland and Maureen Kincaid Speller have both reviewed the book in the past week – I share most of their opinions about the book’s flaws. I did occasionally wonder if the theme of the book had something to do with free will; Xulai and Abasio both struggle in the later parts of the book with the idea that their lives and futures have been manipulated in such a way as to give them very little choice. And in one of the scraps of the world’s history that we gather, it is discovered that a large portion of the population was wiped out by machines able to find and eliminate people who were thinking the wrong thoughts. Charles Stross suggests in a recent post that his Rule 34 (also on the Clarke shortlist) is in part about a world where, among other things, “ our notion of free will turns out to have hollow foundations”. It’s just possible that Tepper planned to do something along those lines. If so, it would not change the fact that the book is directionless, bizarre, and flaps around for ages before suddenly cramming all manner of lunacy into its final quarter.

But what I really want to think about is Dan Hartland’s comment about feeling forced to read a text as satire. While reading the book I found myself thinking (or tagging bits of text with) “you’re joking” so many times that I had to eventually consider the possibility. Dan concludes that the novel as a whole is too incoherent to allow for a reading as sustained satire, but I can’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that the point of this book is an author trying out what she can get away with.

“In order to allay suspicion, I am about to sing something pastoral and suggestive of bucolic innocence.”

There’s nothing particularly notable about the prose, except that the human-horse interactions (and human-chipmunk interactions) are rather too Narnia. What is interesting though, is the text’s approach to providing information – the shifts in perspective from one character to another seem designed to conceal rather than reveal information. The result of this is a situation in which it is obvious to the reader that some form of manipulation is happening, and that the book knows far more than it’s willing to tell just yet. I found myself admiring the sheer audacity of it.

So if this blatant teasing with information is one of the things Tepper is trying to get away with, what are the others? There’s the talking horse which so upset Christopher Priest; presumably because talking animals traditionally fit better with fantasy than science fiction. But there is a reasonably scientific (by the rather elastic values of science that most SF employs) explanation for this in-text. Plus, as Farah Mendlesohn says, “any sufficiently dilapidated far future planet is indistinguishable from fantasy”. Sometimes the far future planet in question is the Earth. (The “any sufficiently advanced technology” maxim might equally be used to excuse the fantastic elements that are not explained – souls that glow and shapeshifting animals among them). Ultimately the strongest argument I can make against the text’s being science fiction is the one Adam Roberts makes here - its flavour is not sfnal. (And once again I’m reminded that applying rasa theory to the Western concept of genre might be rewarding; I wonder if Roberts is familiar with it?) And – keeping in mind that intent means very little – I wonder how much of this determined non-SFnality, in a book about global warming and genetic alteration, was deliberate.

‘Here, madam, you seem a pleasant cephalopod, please accept this with my compliments.’ 

The Sea King is another element of the book that makes me wonder. Because SFF has done giant squid so often by now, that each new giant squid seems as much or more comment on the genre than a plot element in its own right.

Then there are things like this:

“Oh, mares,” said Blue**, shaking his head. “They always have to be whinnied into it. Or . . . subdued.”

“Why, Blue,” cried Abasio in an outraged voice. “That’s rape.”

Blue snorted. “I have long observed that human people do not care what they do in front of livestock, and believe me, what some humans do during mating makes horses look absolutely . . . gentle by comparison.” He stalked away and stood, front legs crossed, nose up, facing the sea.

“Isn’t Abasio your friend?” the Sea King asked him.

“Friends do not call their friends rapists,” said the horse without turning around.

 

It seems incredible to me that I’m supposed to take this seriously. I must assume I’m not.

 

None of this necessarily adds up to any sort of unified reading of the text as parodic; but then, as I said above, I don’t think it’s supposed to be. But I think we might be being trolled, and on the whole I’d feel more kindly towards the book if this were the case.

 

 

 

*The award finally went to Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb, a book I thought was excellent. It’s nice to be proved right.

** the talking horse

 

Posted in animal creatures, cephalopods, genre, science fiction | 2 Comments »

February 27, 2012

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals

I read The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals on a train to Amritsar, and wrote most of this piece in my hotel room later that day. Short version – it is very silly and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

A version of the piece below appeared in the Left of Cool column in last weekend’s Sunday Guardian.

 

**********************************************

According to a wise man, from the beginning of time mankind has had two basic questions when confronted with something new. “Can we eat it?” and “Can we have sex with it?”

Bestiaries have existed for centuries. They describe various exotic animals, both real and imaginary, often completely erasing the line between the two. Early bestiaries were not scientifically rigourous; they relied on rumours of rumours of hearsay. They gave us the manticore, the unicorn, the bonnacon (a bison-like creature that defended itself with explosive, projectile faeces). But while a worrying number of bestiaries addressed themselves to the second of the questions posed above, few tackled the first.

Indians are familiar with a variety of traditions of what is and is not edible. Does it contain onions or garlic? Is it halal? Is it wrong to eat beef if it originated from a foreign cow? In The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, Ann Vandermeer sets out to discover whether or not a selection of fantastic beasts are fit for the consumption of a practising Jew. It turns out that this question is less simple than it appears.

For example, what of those chimerical creatures made up of parts of more than one animal? If a part of the animal is kosher, does that extend to the whole? Does the reverse apply? Clearly one cannot contemplate eating a mermaid, but what about her fishy tail? Chickens are kosher, but does that mean that the cannibalistic Pollo Maligno, found in Colombia, is allowable despite its predatory, cannibalistic instincts? And what does ‘cannibal’ even mean here; does this chicken feed off other chickens or off humans? And if the former, shouldn’t those chickenesque abominations that we’re told go into fast food be non-Kosher as well? At the end of the world the righteous will apparently feast on the great beasts of the sea, land and air (respectively Leviathan, Behemoth and Ziz), but does this mean that those creatures are kosher only in the case of an apocalypse? Are angels kosher (or even imaginary), and what sort of terrible person would want to eat one in the first place? Theology is a deeply complex matter.

These weighty issues are rendered accessible by the format of the book. In the tradition of Socrates, these philosophical debates take the form of dialogues between Vandermeer herself and “Evil Monkey”, the blogging alter-ego of her husband Jeff. The Evil Monkey persona seems to know very little about the subject and acts as something of a foil for Vandermeer’s own persuasive arguments to educate the reader.

Frequently Vandermeer cites other authorities, including Dr Jorge Luis Borges, author of that great scholarly work The Book of Imaginary Beings. Or Thackeray T. Lambshead, compiler of a guide to eccentric and discredited diseases. Towards the end of the book another expert is called upon; Duff Goldman, the star of a cooking-based reality TV show. Goldman gives us his opinion on how these creatures are to be cooked, if they are to be cooked at all. From him we learn that the Mongolian Death Worm might make a delicious sushi; that Tribbles, seen in the Star Trek universe, are probably kosher (I have my doubts) and definitely tender; that while it would be predictable and dull to prepare H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu as calamari, he’d be perfect broiled, garnished, and served with a sweet white wine.

One of the best things about The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals is that it does not confine itself to traditional creatures of myth, showing a far more global, inclusive approach. So we see the Japanese Abumi-Guchi (not kosher), the Tokoloshe of Zulu myth (not kosher) and the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (kosher, and frequently seen by Welshmen on their way back from the pub). Occasionally Evil Monkey’s flippant comments detract from the tone of what is otherwise a serious theological work, but despite this occasional lapse The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals is a thoughtful analysis of religious dilemmas that may be far from imaginary.

**********************************************

 

Posted in animal creatures, food, Left of Cool, religion, silliness | 1 Comment »

February 23, 2012

What is it like to be a dragon?

It is probably not news to anyone by now that the new My Little Pony cartoons are quite good. Unfortunately it is probably also not news to anyone who has spent more than a minute thinking about it that they have problems, particularly with regard to how they deal with race. Because despite this being a series in which the main character is purple and her friends come in all the shades of the rainbow, ethnicity does exist in Equestria. We see it in an episode where the sole zebra character (not a pony, note) is signalled as being African. We see it again in the episode Over a Barrel, in which the ponies come into conflict with the buffaloes who are obvious Native American/First Nations analogues (in this as well as other episodes of the series the history the ponies are given is of the settler/pioneer variety). I find the show’s apparent comfort with that tradition a little bizarre – presumably at some point someone gave a thought to how the race thing worked within the show’s universe? Besides the obvious offensiveness it seems incredibly naive.

Children’s books/tv with talking animals tend to anthropomorphise unevenly. Pets and food in particular often don’t get a voice – everyone knows pets don’t speak, and food that did so would be creepy.  Goofy can talk, Pluto cannot; Noddy and Miffy are friends with bears, monkeys, and pigs but Bumpy Dog and Snuffy only bark. In the MLP universe, the cows, buffalo, donkeys, griffins and dragons all talk; the animals the ponies keep as pets (an owl, a cat, a tortoise who humiliates himself considerably for Rainbow Dash’s company, a rabbit, etc) do not.

Speech is important here because in a fantasy world with multiple sentient species in it I suspect the ability of a species to communicate becomes at least in part the arbiter of what personhood entails. So the buffalo are people in a way that Owloysius the owl (despite being excellent and an owl) isn’t.

My Little Pony does quite a bit of playing around with language, as is evident from the episode titles, the flood of horse-puns and cities like “Fillydelphia” and “Canterlot”. One of the things the show does is to insert the word “pony” into a number of words and phrases, such as “everypony”. “Pony” is thus used to replace “body” or “person”. I’d been bothered by this for some time, but in the most recent episode (“A Friend in Deed”) I particularly noticed that non-Pony characters, a pair of donkeys, were using “everypony” as well.

And so Spike the dragon, Cranky Doodle Donkey and other characters live in a world and communicate in a language in which personhood is literally defined as something that they are not. The idea that a person and a pony are the same seems to be at the heart of the language. And going by the racial stereotyping I mention above, if the Native Americans are buffalo-not-ponies and the African immigrants are zebras-not-ponies, it seems heavily implied that personhood in Equestria is limited to what in this world would be the white settlers.

Posted in animal creatures, children's literature, my god it's full of sparkles, racism, tv, Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

« Older Entries  |