This book is a series of stories which explore our relationship with animals. But what a series of stories! From a Barn Owl perching on someone’s head to the furore about letting a few White-tailed Eagles go on the Isle of Wight, by way of the DMZ between the Koreas, Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain, a new way to farm in North Dakota, befriending a Wild Boar in Poland, Idi Amin’s slaughter of wildlife alongside people and the hunting of the Huia in New Zealand.
The chapter titles include Damned Nations and Islands of Shite, The Necrophiliac’s Embrace, Members and Codpieces and Atishoo, Atishoo. Those examples may not tell you much about what the chapters deal with but they give an indication of the unconventional nature of the book which is organised, up to a point, along some sort of historical trajectory from those caves to the present. Actually though, this is a book into which it is perfectly OK to dip at random as each series of pages is likely to take you to different continents at different times to make rather different points.
The stories are well chosen and well told. The book makes its considerable impression on the reader, at least this reader, by surprising them with memorable and poignant stories about our species’s relationship with other animals, different human societies’ relationships with animals at different times in history and individual’s interactions with individual animals too.
I learned something about someone I knew in these pages too. Back in the 1980s when I was based in the Zoology Department in Oxford so was the great theoretical evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton. I don’t remember ever sharing a conversation with him but I went to his talks and passed the great man in the corridor and in awe. Hamilton died in 2000 (aged only 63 I see – he seemed old in the 1980s but clearly wasn’t!) and in his papers were found instructions about his wish for his corpse to be taken to the Amazon jungle rainforest, to a plot protected from ‘possums and vultures’ where the great Coprophanaeus beetles would enter his body, live on his flesh and bury him, and in so doing they would enable him to escape death and he would live in their bodies as the beetles moved through the rainforest. Well! Actually it was a forest closer to home where he was buried, Wytham Woods, but it was an insight into the mind of a mathematical evolutionist.
This book is different, quirky and powerful. When I picked it up I was uncertain whether I would get on with it, but in fact it is gripping.
The cover? Interesting – it caught my attention. I’d give it 8/10 but I might have given it 9/10 without those quotes on the front. Or I might have swapped the quotes with the author’s name.
Beastly: a new history of animals and us by Keggie Carew is published by Canongate.
Buy direct from Blackwell’s – a proper bookshop (and I’ll get a little bit of money from them)
