Category: Animals

Two novel encounters with foxes

11/7/2017

What’s special about the fox? What do we project into these beautiful, furtive and sometimes highly disruptive creatures? Two impressive debut novels depicting an individual in crisis locking eyes with a fox might go some way towards answering these questions – and other enigmas of the human condition. The first, in which the fox takes centre stage, takes place in an urban setting; the second, where the fox is only one of several animals encountered, is in a rural context. Although I have less to say about the second, I can heartily recommend both.

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Nineveh: Trading in painless pest relocations

13/5/2017

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It’s strange, what disgusts people. Who would scorn the friendship of a gecko, for example: golden-eyed, translucent-skinned, toes splayed on a farmhouse wall? Who could resent a long-legged spider, knitting its silver in the corner of the room? But they do: people will pay to have them killed, poisoned, destroyed.

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The Birdcage by Clive Aslet

22/10/2016

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Lieutenant Winnington-Smith is a promising artist and hopeless soldier who gets injured on his second day. Captain Southall is the commander of the Royal Flying Corps, Kite Balloon Section, who takes ‘Winner’ up in the sky to sketch the view. Elsie Fox is the fearless young working-class woman who drives an ambulance for the British Women’s Hospital and developed a soft spot for Winner on the boat out there. Isabel Hinchcliff is an upper-class nurse at the hospital, brought up with a heavily starched upper lip. Welcome to Salonika in the middle of the First World War, a multicultural playground and hotbed of spies in neutral Greece where those with the means can make believe carnage doesn’t lurk just over the horizon.

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Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain & Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux

10/10/2016

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I was pleased to mark World Mental Health Day last year with a post on dignity in fictional representations of mental health. This year’s theme is dignity in mental health first aid. Now, although I perceive therapy as a longer term project rather than first aid, its foundation in active listening is fundamental to our initial response to others in distress. And, as no-one can engage in therapy unless they actively want to, it’s an approach that bestows dignity, so what better day to celebrate my series on fictional therapists by introducing you to a couple of new ones? As a finale, I’ve got a piece of flash fiction on combining short-term and long-term solutions to mental ill-health.

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Sounding out the body in fiction

7/8/2016

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I spent what seemed to me a considerable amount of time flushing out what I thought was a bit of leek stuck between my upper right incisor and its neighbouring canine – first with my fingernail, then with the corner of a business card, and finally with a sharpened matchstick. But there was no piece of leek. It was an erroneous message that my gums were sending me, themselves misled by some previous irritation.

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The stain of sin: Smoke by Dan Vyleta

7/7/2016

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Mother says that I am obsessed; that far from dismissing Smoke, I have made it my idol. Indeed I am grateful for the Smoke. It tells us when we err. Imagine a world in which we err and nobody notices. Not even oneself. Until one goes to seed by increments and slides into the madness of villainy. Smoke eats our reason with a charcoal spoon. We measure our humanity against its darkness. It is good it leaves a mark.

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Down on the farm: Addlands by Tom Bullough

11/6/2016

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Less than a week after I published my post on how we relate to fictional characters as if they were real, I was chatting to a farmer out on the moors. He was on his quad bike looking for some motorbikers who’d trespassed on the land that feeds his sheep and cows; I was patrolling on foot enjoying the sunshine and wildlife and hoping the next people I asked to put their dog on a lead would comply. We spoke about the impact of the human footprint (and tyre) on the changing landscape, and he referred to other farmers he knew in tourist hotspots who have to contend with far more visitors. Ever conscious of my limited countryside knowledge, I wanted to tell him that I knew a farmer too. But I didn’t, because the farmer I had in mind lives in a book. So I’m telling you instead. As Norah commented on my cognitive poetics post, finding a suitable channel to sound off about our reading is part of the motivation for writing blogs.

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Hidden gems: The Sacred Combe by Thomas Maloney

18/5/2016

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When she was about six or seven, my youngest niece was obsessed with old books. Too young to articulate what drew her to them, she would spend a quiet hour when she came to visit turning the pages of an antique volume of poetry. Thinking she might prefer something more suited to her reading age and, admittedly, anxious to preserve my small collection of old books, I offered her a modern anthology of the work of Hilaire Belloc, which she vehemently rejected. Ten years on, I wonder if she’d be the ideal reader of Thomas Maloney’s debut novel, which I received courtesy of the publisher, Scribe.

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Seropurulent: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

9/5/2016

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Paul and Veblen are engaged to be married. They’re clearly in love and clearly, with their mismatched attitudes to the world beyond themselves, unsuited for the decades of companionship we hope will follow a wedding. It is obvious from the moment Paul gives her a ring, with a diamond so large it interferes with her obsessional typing.

Unlike Veblen, who espouses the anti-capitalist values of her namesake, the economist Thorstein Veblen, Paul is ambitious. A research neurologist, when the pharmaceutical empire Hutmacher offers him the opportunity to begin clinical trials on the device he’s developed to minimise battlefield brain damage, he dismisses his ethical reservations with the word Seropurulent “an ironic superlative they used in med school for terrible things that had to be overlooked” (p62). Raised by hippies, the trappings of the consumerist world spell safety for Paul (p66):

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Becoming a person: The Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball & The Man I Became by Peter Verhelst

22/2/2016

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Let me share with you my reflections on two highly original novels about dissemblance and truth in the process of becoming a person. Although the publishers don’t do so, I’m classing both as slipstream fiction, a place between fantasy, sci-fi and literary fiction I’ve also explored in my own short stories. Read on, and let me know what you think.

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Woof, woof! Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume & Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

21/1/2016

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The other week, as I was tramping across the soggy fields near my house, a woman stopped me and asked if I’d noticed a boxer on my travels. Although a big dog off the lead is as welcome to me as a rampaging lion, I managed to keep my voice and face sympathetic as she explained how her pet had darted out the front door. Apologies I can’t supply the ending of this real-life drama (memoir?), but I’m sharing to show I’m not a canine lover. I’ve steered away from doggy fiction since Waiting For Doggo, but, these two took my fancy, proving – as if I didn’t know – that, even narrated from the point of view of an earthworm, fiction is always about the human condition.

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Two novel encounters with foxes

Nineveh: Trading in painless pest relocations

The Birdcage by Clive Aslet

Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain & Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux

Sounding out the body in fiction

The stain of sin: Smoke by Dan Vyleta

Down on the farm: Addlands by Tom Bullough

Hidden gems: The Sacred Combe by Thomas Maloney

Seropurulent: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

Becoming a person: The Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball & The Man I Became by Peter Verhelst

Woof, woof! Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume & Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

2017 Reading Challenge

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