Water for Elephants

 

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Being in the used book business, I have a different perspective on bestsellers.  I have learned that I don't have to rush out and buy the hot new novel because sooner or later it will show up on my sorting table.  A few years ago, while I was waiting to run across a copy of Sara Gruen's novel Water For Elephants, I found, totally by accident, her first novel Riding Lessons.  I had just finished reading Jane Smiley's book Horse Heaven, which I loved, so I was excited about the possibility of another great horse novel.  Riding Lessons was nothing like Horse Heaven -- Gruen's debut book  is essentially a romance novel set on a horse farm, with some family drama thrown in.  The horses are a very real presence and the book was enjoyable.  I felt, toward the end, that the main character's handwringing and soul searching went on a bit too long, and the outcome was predictable, but I liked the book.  And I kept looking for Water for Elephants. 

Of course, everyone knows by now that Gruen's second book was a smash hit -- a bestseller around the world that has recently been made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon.  (I haven't seen the movie, though I plan to, so I won't comment on it here.)  After Riding Lessons, I expected to like Water For Elephants -- after all, it had a depression era circus setting, lots of animals including Rosie the Elephant.  How could that not be appealing?  But Water For Elephants is a different class of book entirely -- it is magic.  The unusual setting is richly evoked, the characters are eccentric and engaging, both sharp edged and appealingly vulnerable.  I can't easily think of another example of a writer who has made such a leap between her first and second books.  Going from Riding Lessons to Water for Elephants is going from romance to Romance.  We're in the world of doomed love and haunted heroes now and the mysterious and menacing backdrop of the traveling circus is the perfect setting.

Sophie's Choice, by William Styron

Because of the archetypal love triangle at its core -- the naive young hero, the sad beautiful girl with secrets, and her charismatic, demonic husband -- Water for Elephants reminded me of Sophie's Choice.  Of course, the darkness surrounding the characters in Water is not the all-encompassing darkness of the Holocaust, as it is in Styron's masterpiece.  (And Marlena is not Sophie, one of the richest characters in modern literature -- Marlena is the least realized of all the characters and for good reason -- she's not the books true heroine.) The darkness here is the depression, the poverty of the country through which the circuses travel and the constant threat of failure which hangs over their heads.  And also, unspoken but keenly felt, the darkness of the human relationship to the animals on which they depend.  Animals are everywhere in Water for Elephants, as atmosphere and background, as metaphor and reflection on human behavior, and (at least in one magnificent case) as characters.

 The hero of the novel, Jacob, is a young veterinary student who has flunked out of (or quit) school after the death of his parents and who lands quite by accident in the traveling circus.  The show's megaerie includes horses (which the love interest, Marlena rides in the most popular act), a yak, a polar bear, an orangutan -- all of which become Jacob's charges.  But it is shortly after Jacob joins that the show's owner,  Uncle Al, buys out another foundering circus and acquires Rosy.  

The elephant looms against the far sidewall, an enormous beast the color of storm clouds ...at least ten feet tall at the shoulder.  Her skin is mottled and cracked like a scorched riverbed from the tip of her trunk all the way down to her wide feet. Only her ears are smooth.  She peers at us with eerily human eyes.  They're amber, set deep in her head, and ringed with outrageously long lashes ....

Her trunk reaches out to us, moving like an independent creature.  It waves in front of August, then Marlena, an finally, me.  At the end of it, a fingerlike protrusion wiggles and gasps.  The nostrils open and close, snuffing and blowing, and then the trunk retreats.  It swings in front of her like a pendulum, an enormous an muscled worm.  Its finger grasps stray pieces of hay from the ground and drops them again.  I watch the swaying trunk and wish it would come back.  I hold my hand out in offering, but it doesn't return.  

It's interesting that Gruen lingers longer over the first meeting of Jacob and Rosie than he does over Jacob's meeting with Marlena.  And indeed, it is Rosie as much as the girl that Jacob will remember tenderly in his old age.  Rosie, too -- maybe in truth, only -- is Jacob's lost and tragic love.

Today we are so used to images of animals -- to photographs and nature programs on TV and even IMAX documentaries in larger than life size -- that remembering what it was like in the time period Gruen writes about is very difficult.  In Depression era America, most people had seen, at most, grainy photographs or drawings of exotic animals.   Orangutans and polar bears and yaks were almost mythological.  And bringing a creature the size of Rosie -- with the imposing presence of a full grown elephant -- to small town America (America before TVs or even radios were common) would have been like touring a dinosaur today.  Only more so, because we've all seen Jurassic Park and a hundred other convincing, lifelike simulations of dinosaurs.  P.T. Barnum often said that the circus rested on two legs, clowns and elephants.  That's what the people wanted.

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The description of Rosie reminds me first of Joseph Conrad.  There is in that monolithic image, something of the impenetrable otherness that Conrad saw in Africa and Africans.  The "other" is always the point at which the empathic imagination fails.  The greatest of writers -- think of Tolstoy -- reached the furthest.  In War and Peace Tolstoy depicted the interior lives of hundreds of characters and even horses.  Conrad's empathy failed when it approached Africans.  Melville could stand in awe of Moby Dick, be frightened and enraptured by the whale, but couldn't imagine its world.  Even Faulkner, who alone among great modern writers had a powerful empathy for nature and how the destruction of nature was linked to the destruction of Native peoples and the subjugation of blacks -- even Faulkner couldn't see Old Ben as anything but "other".  What a different story "The Bear" might be if Old Ben's perspective were included.

But we notice something in the description of Rosie.  The monolith is not just standing mute.  She reaches out.  She gestures at each of the main characters.  We feel that she wants to understand them.  To make contact.  And Jacob responds.  That response -- much more than the entertaining but predictable love triangle between August, Marlena and Jacob -- is the heartbeat of Water For Elephants.

Ape House by Sara Gruen

In her next novel, Ape House, Sara Gruen chose to write about Bonobos -- in many ways the most human of non-human primates, and made the decision to include the Bonobos as fully fledged characters.  

I have a review of Ape House, and more about Water for Elephants, coming soon.

"How the Dead Dream" (Lydia Millet Review/interview Part Two)

(You can see the first part of my review of Lydia Millet's books, especially Love in Infant Monkeys here)

How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet

How the Dead Dream, Lydia Millet's most recent novel, is described as being "the first book of a trilogy dealing with extinction."  It is a very accomplished book, full of a sense of pity and awe that at moments almost overwhelmed me.  Ms. Millet was kind enough to answer some questions for our blog, and I asked her about taking on a topic of such size and complexity:

The series isn’t only about extinction, but it circles the idea. The second and third books come out this fall and next — they’re called Ghost Lights and Magnificence — and they continue with the same people from How the Dead Dream, along the same chronology, but have different protagonists. In Ghost Lights, the one coming out soonest, the connection with extinction is fairly abstract; this is mainly a story about a devoted father who discovers his wife’s infidelity and takes off into the jungle to get away from her. In Magnificence the connection comes into clear focus again: that same wife, who was unfaithful, inherits an old mansion full of taxidermy mounts.

I also asked her about her background, and what it was that brought her to such an unusual theme:

I’ve been obsessed with animals always, and with extinction for at least the past twenty years since I became aware of the extinction crisis. Since roughly 1996 I’ve worked in endangered species advocacy, in one way or another, after doing a graduate degree in environmental policy and economics. So it was inevitable I would write about these matters. It took me a while to get there because the task is a hard one and delicate to negotiate.

How the Dead Dream is the story of T., a young man who grows up with an almost fetishistic attachment to money and becomes a successful real estate developer.  He is expert at the art of making himself useful to those around him, and yet he lives at some remove from all of them, not really connecting.  T. seems unaware of his isolation, however, until one night on the way to Las Vegas he runs over a coyote on the freeway.  He stops to see what he has hit, and unwittingly opens himself to an experience that will change his life.

He willed himself not look at her legs, to try and ignore what was back there bleeding ... He looked only at her face and her side to see if she was still breathing.  But despite the fact that he was not looking, as he sat beside her, he imagined the shock from the ruined legs coursing through her body, what must be the blind surge of pain as the end closed in ... She was dying in the smells of asphalt, exhaust, and gasoline, no doubt also the smell of her own blood, and him, and other smells he could not know himself.

The fullness, the terrible sympathy!

Had he felt this before, he wondered?  Maybe when he was a boy?  Animals died by the road and you saw them all the time, everyone did.  You saw them lying there, so obvious in their deadness, sad lumps of dirty meat; you saw their limp furry masses thrown up like flowers along the yellow stripes, the tumbly asphalt edges.  You saw the red insides all exposed.  You though: that is the difference between them and me.  My insides are firmly contained.

Reading that passage, I couldn't help but remember a similar point of realization in my own life.  A few years ago I started volunteering at a wildlife rehab center and one of the animals I worked with most often was the opossum.  I often had to handle and clean up after the older opossum, and I also learned to tube feed the tiny babies (opossum are marsupials, so they don't have the same kind of nursing instincts that other mammals have -- you can feed baby squirrels, for instance, with a syringe which they will eagerly suck on, but opossum have to be tube fed).  In our orientation, the trainer mentioned that mother opossum that are hit by cars, often have babies still alive in their pouches, and that it's important to check the pouches, because the babies can be save.  A few weeks later, I passed an opossum who had died in the middle of the road, and with the lesson still fresh in my mind I pulled over to the side, watched for traffic, and ran out to check the body.  It turned out to be a male, but getting so close to the dead opossum, a member of a species I had been coming to know and feel some affection for, suddenly made me think about all the animals we see dead in the city, which we so easily pass by -- each in its own sense an individual, with an individual life that matters to it.

T., in Millet's novel, has a similar experience:

And were I to lie on the side of the road dying, it would be nothing like that.  No one would drive around me:  the cars would stop, tens upon hundreds of them; there would be lines of stopped traffic for miles as they removed my body, flashing their red and blue lights of crisis and competence. 

Presently he realized that her flank had ceased to rise and fall ... Where was the ambulance?  No: he was all she had.  All her lights, her rescue workers.

It was just a coyote.  No one would fault him for leaving.

And yet he felt confused.

"Good girl," he whispered.

I asked Lydia Millet about her own relationship with animals.  Did she have many pets growing up?  What did she think were the most important lessons she'd learned from relationships with animals.  

Growing up, I had cats, birds, fish, guinea pigs, mice and one large rabbit. What I’ve chiefly learned from my pets: There’s a language barrier between us. My pug dog is indifferent to my remarks about the gold standard and medical marijuana. I’m willing to live with that, but what about when I talk to her about her food issues? Bad breath? There I wish we could communicate better. Frankly the thing worries me.

Indeed, this theme of otherness -- of the wall of non-communication that separates us from animals, is a theme that runs through Millet's work.  In How the Dead Dream and even more explicitly in the stories in Love in Infant Monkeys (her 2009 story collection which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) there is always a certain opaqueness to the animals -- its hard even to call them characters -- but also a kind of realism which is rare in fiction.  It seems that in most fiction animals are either part of the setting, just there as backdrop like the family pet on a sit-com, or they are used metaphorically and allegorically (as for example in much magic realism, or The Life of Pi by Yann Martel).  I never get that impression from  Millet's animals.  Even when they are already dead, as the Pheasant shot by Madonna just before the beginning of the story "Sexing the Pheasant", they have a sense of integrity and independence -- that is, they are there in their own right, and whatever it is that humans are trying to make of them never quite encompasses them -- they are unknowable, but also not co-opted.  

About why animals have become so important in her fiction -- and what about our relationship to them most captures here imagination, Millet says:

Partly the unknowability of animals’ interior experience, partly a sense of the deep privilege of still living in a world with that unknown difference all around us, that abundance of being. I fear a future in which the world is so impoverished of wild creatures that all that remains is a truncated version of us — us and our toys and our machines, the things that we’ve made and nothing else. That hovers over me as a likely and terrible prospect.

That fear also reverberates in her work.  I asked her What she thinks about the possibility of introducing non-human points of view into fiction?  Can we get outside our own projections well enough to really try to imagine their worlds?  Is the problem or representing animals in fiction more difficult than the perennial issues of human writers representing different races, nationalities, genders?  

Far more difficult. There have been some noble literary tries at this, to write from the supposed POV of an animal, and the effort shows — Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, for instance, almost succeeded in crafting a viable elephant POV, it had some moments of inspiration and certainly there was insight there (Gowdy’s such a talented writer), but also in some particular aesthetic ways it cringingly failed, as has, so far, every such attempt. I think the trouble is twofold: One, we don’t know animal language and so we can’t in most cases even presume to elaborate the nature of their subjectivity. Two, exactly what is fascinating about nonhuman animals is their not-us-ness in its infinite variety. So you can make them into us, when you write about them — as in many children’s stories, a convention I love. Or you can try in literature to evoke them as narrators, but in most cases that second, loftier project will fail. It will fail precisely because it promises the impossible and so can only deliver the unbelievable. A writer may, in writing say a chipmunk narrator, create a thing that passes for being an imagined rendition of chipmunk, but the likelihood that such a creation will succeed in suspending disbelief, be subtle and complex, and also produce an enticing simulacrum of chipmunkness is highly remote. 

As a writer -- and as someone who works and lives closely with animals -- I don't want to believe that Millet is right about that.  I also suspect that this perception of "unknowability" is tied in a way that is not immediately obvious, to the fear which she expressed before, that fear of the loss of otherness and being trapped in a world entirely of our own making.  

Of course, it was partly because of my own preoccupation with these questions that I began "Books and Beasts" in the first place.  So I will be returning to them again in the very near future.

Related Posts:

Love in Infant Monkeys (Lydia Millet review Part One)

 

Questioning Point of View

 

Love in Infant Monkeys (Lydia Millet review/interview Part One)

 

Love in Infant Monkeys, by Lydia Millet

I believe I was in high school when I first read about Harry Harlow's famous studies with infant monkeys.  In the classic experiment, the baby monkeys were raised in isolation, and they were given a choice between a surrogate mother made of wire and one made of terrycloth.  In one version of the experiment, the "soft" mother offered no food while the wire one did.  In the reverse version, the terrycloth surrogate offered food and the wire one did not.  What Harlow found was that the monkeys always preferred the soft mothers, even when they didn't give food, and  they only chose the wire mothers when they needed food.  These experiments were considered landmarks in the study of infant imprinting and are still referenced in psychology texts today.  They are one of the studies that everyone with an interest in psychology knows about, but often without being intimately aware of, or giving much thought to, how they were conducted.  They've become part of the background of psychology, something taken for granted and often cited, like a metaphor whose literal meaning we have forgotten.

The truth of Harry Harlow's experiments is a little harder to take.  In the fifties and sixties he conducted numerous experiments on the effects of total and partial isolation on the behavior and mental states of rhesus monkeys.  These were infant monkeys taken from their mothers soon after birth.  In addition to the often cited "surrogate mother" experiments, Harlow and his students also kept monkeys in total isolation for extended periods of time.  This isolation produced monkeys with extreme psychological disturbances, including catatonia, repetitive stereotyped movement around their cages, and self-mutilation.  (You can find a video of Harry explaining his most famous experiment on YouTube .  The "mad scientist" feel is hard to miss.  You can also find a detailed and surprisingly uncritical description of the experiments at a site called Adoption History Project .  There's a somewhat more critical description on Wikipedia  -- but the reference notes to that article show that similar experiments in the effects of deprivation and manipulation of maternal bonds were still going on with rats and mice, at least as recently as the 1980's and '90's).  

Harry Harlow called his most famous paper, first published in Scientific American in 1959, "Love in Infant Monkeys".  He is quite open about his reasons for performing these experiments on his chosen subjects:

The first love of the human infant is for his mother. The tender intimacy of this attachment is such that it is sometimes regarded as a sacred or mystical force, an instinct incapable of analysis. No doubt such compunctions, along with the obvious obstacles in the way of objective study, have hampered experimental observation of the bonds between child and mother ... it is difficult, if not impossible, to use human infants as subjects for the studies necessary to break through the present speculative impasse. . . . Clearly research into the infant-mother relationship has need of a more suitable laboratory animal. We believe we have found it in the infant monkey.

Lydia Millet borrowed Harlow's title -- and Harlow himself -- for the central story of her 2009 short story collection -- "Love in Infant Monkeys".  This collection, which was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, is situated at "the rare intersection of wilderness and celebrity" (according to the jacket copy).  Each of the stories is built around the encounter between a famous human and an animal -- some very tenuous, some intimate -- and as a collection the stories show an impressive range of style, technique and point of view.  It has the titillation of a supermarket tabloid -- all those celebrities and their "hidden" lives --  wrapped up in stories that are at once accessible and challenging.  The best of them pack an emotional charge that will stay with a reader (they have with me), and as a whole the collection is one of the smartest I've read in a long time.  Millet seems to be a writer who thinks deeply about difficult problems and isn't afraid to let them remain difficult on the page.

But let's go back for a moment to Harry Harlow.

Millet's story adopts a distanced, almost biographical tone.  One of the greatest pleasures of this collection is its rich variety of points-of-view.   The stories contain everything from stream-of-consciousness (Madonna after shooting a pheasant on her English estate) to hearsay (a wife recounting an incident that happened to her husband), to fairly straight forward first and third person stories.  I was delighted to see so much range so I asked Millet about point-of-view and how conscious her decisions about it are while writing: 

I don’t typically think about point of view, I have that when I start; in this collection the voice was demanded by the celebrity-animal conjunction, I felt, where there wasn’t much room for choice on my part. I couldn’t have written about Madonna without interior monologue, or about Harry Harlow in the first person; these were dictated, form by content.

"Love in Infant Monkeys" (the story) begins with an almost text-book tone:

Harry Harlow had a general hypothesis:  Mothers are useful, in scientific terms.  They have an intrinsic value, even beyond their breast milk.  Call it their company.

One of the less high-minded pleasures of this collection is guessing exactly where the real lives of famous people end and fiction begins.  With some stories its easier.     For instance:

But he spoke harshly of his test subjects.  "The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out to be a property I can publish," he said.  "I don't have any love for them.  I never have.  How could you love a monkey?"

I'm not sure how much those words reflect either Harry Harlow's feelings -- or his publicly stated feelings -- about monkeys.  Indeed, I couldn't find any public statements from Harlow that seemed to reflect feelings at all.  He talked about feelings, as a subject for scientific study, but never seems to have expressed his feelings at all.

More importantly -- in the world of Millet's story -- we still can't be sure how much Harlow's words reflect his true feelings, and how much they reflect a repression of feeling that is killing him.  He wanders through his laboratory, checking on the monkeys in his "pits of despair" -- the total isolation tanks in which he confines young monkeys to observe the effects.  He singles out one young female who is "still plucky ... still game to try and get out, to change her situation."  But he knows that the end is always defeat, surrender and depression.  Harry himself seems to be sinking into a pit of despair -- he is haunted by dreams of monkey mothers, fierce and protective, forced to watch their infants wasting away.  The bleakness and hopelessness, for both the subjects and the scientist, is inescapable.

I will continue the review of "Love in Infant Monkeys" along with Lydia Millet's most recent novel "How the Dead Dream", and have more of my interview with her in my next posting. 

 

Hachi: A Dog's Tale

 

Hachi: A Dog's Tale 

Directed by Lasse Hallström, starring Richard Gere and Joan Allen

So far, I haven't done any movie reviews on this site -- after all, our title is "Books and Beasts" -- but I recently watched a movie that I think is right at home here.  Hachi: A Dog's Tale  came out in 2009 with little fanfare.  I pay a good bit of attention to movie releases, and I don't remember hearing anything about it.  In fact, I only found it by accident on NetFlix and ordered it because -- well, there's an Akita in the film.  What more do you need?

I remember several years ago when I was working as a volunteer in a companion animal shelter, coming in for my shift one afternoon and being told by the kennel attendants that the "big black-and-white dog" on the back run didn't want to leave his pen to go outside.  Apparently they had tried everything, from coaxing him out with treats to just putting a leash on him and insisting that he go.  Nothing worked.  Often, during the hours when the shelter was open the staff were busy dealing with the public and the volunteers were left on their own.  I frequently do well with difficult and stubborn dogs (as long as they aren't my own -- but that's a different story) so I went around to take a look at this problem pooch.  As soon as I stopped in front of his pen, I understood.  The beautiful black and white dog stretched out on the dog bed had the unmistakable "noble" head and upcurled tail of an Akita.  He was young, maybe a year old, and there were some pretty ugly wounds on the top of his head probably the result of a fight.

"Who in the world was dumb enough to tangle with you?" I asked him.

He just watched me.  Not friendly.  Not aggressive.  Just watched.

I understood right away what the problem was.  A lot of dog handlers and trainers claim that the secret to dealing with difficult dogs is to assert your authority, to make it clear that you are the "alpha dominant dog".  I've never been really comfortable with that.  In my experience, dog's are well aware that humans run the world.  Most of them respect that, a few of them rebel against it.  Some, like second class citizens everywhere, are constantly on the lookout for ways to beat the system or slip the leash.  But I suspect that if you could take a survey of dogs everywhere their number one complaint would not be that humans are too strict, or that (according to the Caesar Milan philosophy) humans are poor alpha's and don't provide enough structure -- not even that the food is boring and there aren't enough walks.  I'm pretty sure that the number one complain of dogs everywhere is simply this:  Humans don't listen.  And since dogs spend a great deal of their time observing and "listening" to humans, it must seem more than a little disrespectful.

What's true for most dogs goes double (at least) for Akitas.

The Akita -- Akita-Inu or Great Japanese dog -- is believed by the Japanese to be one of the oldest breeds, a claim that modern DNA studies seem to bear out.  Among those who have only met them casually, Akita's have a reputation for being aloof and disinterested.  But in their homeland, they are a symbol of unswerving loyalty.

Hachi is a remake of a 1987 movie Hachi-kō  by the Japanese director Seijirō Kōyama, and both are based (the American version more loosely) on the real life case of a dog named Hachiko who was adopted by Professor Hidesaburō Ueno of the University of Tokyo in 1924.  Hachiko learned to meet his master's train every day when the Professor came home from work.  In 1925 the Professor died of a cerebral hemorrhage while at work, and never returned home.  Hachiko continued to return to the train station to meet the afternoon train every day for nine years.  His determination attracted national attention.  Articles were published about him.  A bronze statue of him was erected at the train station.  So great was the national admiration for Hachiko that he became an iconic symbol of family loyalty and national determination.  His fame in credited, at least in part, with reawakening interest and pride in the national dog and helping to save the Akita breed from extinction after World War II.

In this version the Professor -- a composer and music teacher -- is played by Richard Gere.  We, as viewers, get to see the young Akita puppy crated up by a monk in Japan and shipped out to a new owner in the United States.  But the crate falls off a baggage cart and the puppy escapes.  By the time the Professor finds him on the train platform he has no identifying information, just a collar which bears the Japanese symbol for the number eight -- Hachi.  The Professor takes him in to save him from the pound, promising his reluctant wife that he will find the dog a home.  There is some low-key conflict between the spouses over adopting the dog, but it is pretty obviously a done deal.  The Professor and the puppy have bonded.  Indeed, what is truly remarkable about this movie is that it is entirely the story of the relationship between one man and one dog.  All of the other human business -- the ups and downs of marriage, the wedding of a daughter and the birth of a grandson, and so on -- are only backdrop, and as the film goes on they drop away.  By the time the Professor dies, the film is entirely Hachi's.  In moments it comes as close as any film I've ever seen to truly presenting us with the dog's point of view.  (A few brief scenes are even shot in black and white to emphasize the dog's perspective).    There are actors who can carry a movie just with the strength of their personality, and as this film goes on it is the surprisingly expressive face of the Akita Hachi that delivers the emotional punch of the film.  (According to the Humane Society reviews Hachi was played as puppy by two Shiba Inus and as an adult by three alternating Akitas.  Good work guys.)

In the shelter that day, I guessed that it would be futile to try more bribes or enticements to draw the Akita out of his kennel.  And I certainly didn't expect him to accept anyone he just met as an alpha.  There was nothing in his body language to suggest that he cared what status we assigned to ourselves.  Hung up on status and primate political projections, humans often overlook how deep the emotion of pride runs in some breeds. 

"I know you call the shots," some dogs silently tell us, "even if I can't quite figure out why.  But Buddy, you're going to treat me with respect.  Or I ain't going nowhere."

I slipped into the kennel and sat down close to, but not right next to, the Akita.  I talked to him quietly and let him get used to me.  After a while I gave him a treat.  After a few treats, I scratched his ear, careful to stay clear of the wounds on his head.  Like most big, heavily coated dogs he had a great need for scratching assistance.  Mostly, I felt, he just wanted to be acknowledge.  Finally, I got up and showed him my leash.  Glancing around to make sure no one could see me, I put my hands together and bowed slightly.

"Akita-san," I said.  A silly American making stereotyped Japanese noises at a dog who had almost certainly been born and raised within a fifty mile radius of Seattle.  But he lifted his head and let me attach the leash, and a second later he slowly stood up, stretched, and followed me out of the kennel.  Just two respectful acquaintances going for a walk.

For those who have any experience with Akitas, Hachi: A Dog's Tale rings especially true.  For any dog lover, it is an unabashed tear jerker.  More so than any other realistic film I've ever seen, this really is the dog's story.  It comes a close to making a real dog the central character as any film I know -- much more so than more well known films like Marley and Me.  It's one of the best animal films I have seen in a long time.

Virals, by Kathy Reichs

 

Virals, by Kathy Reichs

One of the genres I like least on television is the myriad clones of CSI and NCIS.  I'm not overly fond of cop shows and police procedurals anyway, and the CSI-type shows are at the bottom of my list.  Superficially, since I'm a science geek with a great interest in things technological, it seems like these shows might appeal to me, but they don't.  For a lot of reasons that aren't really relevant here.  I'm really bringing all this up as a way of saying that there is one exception to this rule of mine, and it’s a big one. 

I love Bones.

Okay, so part of my fondness for the shows is, I'll admit, Emily Deschanel.    I'm more than a little bit infatuated with her Temperance Brennan character.  (And knowing that Ms. D is, in her personal life, a devoted vegan and supporter of PETA doesn't dampen my affection.)  But beyond the main character's appeal, Bones is just one of the smartest, funniest and most engaging crime shows I've ever watched.  It has a great ensemble cast, good writing, smart use of science and interesting stories.  My few quibbles with the show only highlight how much I like it. 

Bones, of course, is based on the work (and life, according to the credits) of forensic anthropologist and mystery writer Kathy Reichs.   (In one of the TV show's funnier twists, Temperance Brennan is also a mystery writer, who writes books about a character named Kathy Reichs.)  Reichs has been writing the Temperance Brennan novels which inspired the show since the late '90's -- the most recent, Spider Bones (Scribner 2010) -- is the 13th.  The series still seems to be strong, both creatively and in its appeal to readers.

Now, however, Kathy Reichs has done something different.   Virals (RazorBill 2010) is a science fiction action thriller aimed at young adults.  Set in Charleston, S.C. and the islands off the Carolina coast, this book has a tone and style quite distinct from the Temperance Brennan novels.  But Reichs hasn't broken with her familiar world altogether.  The heroine of this novels is fifteen year old Tory Brennan -- yes, Brennan -- the great niece of Temperance Brennnan and a girl very much in the family mold.  Smart, a self-styled science geek, Tory has recently come to the Carolinas to live with a father she barely knows following the death of her mother in an auto accident.  Her father is a marine biologist working for a research facility on one of the islands.  Tory has good friends -- three young men as bright and geeky, in their own ways, as Tory.   And she faces the usual challenges of adolescence -- negotiating the ranks of popularity at an exclusive prep school (which she attends only by virtue of their father's academic position), dealing with the "mean girls", and the confusions of young love (or at least infatuation).  She also has the less common problem of working out a relationship with a caring but sometimes distant father who didn't know she existed until after her mother died.  And she has her scientific interests, including a fascination with the small pack of wolf-dogs that roam free on a nearby island. Plenty of things to keep a smart young woman busy.

But Tory's life is about to get much more complicated.  When she and her friends break into the research facility to use some equipment without authorization, they stumble onto a secret lab where  one of the centers' scientists is conducting unauthorized medical experiments on a wolf-dog puppy captured from the island.  Outraged, Tory convinces her friends to help her liberate the puppy -- who seems to be infected with a form of canine parvovirus-- so they can take him (named Cooper) back to their secret club house and try to nurse him back to health.

And this is where the story takes a hard left into science fiction.  The virus infects Tory and her friends, and alters them genetically, fusing their DNA with Cooper's canine DNA and changing them forever.  It gives  them new abilities -- heightened senses, speed and strength -- that flair unexpectedly.    In addition, it links them all, including Cooper, telepathically. They become a pack -- Virals, as they name themselves -- and their attempts to find out more about what has happened embroil them in a mystery involving a decades old murder, illegal experiments, environmental cover-ups, one of Charleston's most respected and prominent families, and more. 

I was a little put off by the slow beginning of this novel -- there's an information dump in the first pages that I felt could have been doled out more judiciously as the story went on -- but once I got past that I was captured by the story and by the main character.  Virals is the sort of book that I would have loved reading when I was a kid -- very much the descendent of the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys style of mystery, brought up to date with science and much more modern attitudes.  The kids are smart and funny, and they make a good team.  Tory is a natural leader, as determined and perceptive as her Aunt Temperance (in one scene, where the kids unearth a skeleton and Tory is examining the bones, the resemblance is most striking).  The plot is engaging, the action entertaining, the animal rights and environmental subtext clear but never heavy-handed, and even though I figured a few of the secrets out well ahead of time, Reichs still managed to deal a surprise or two along the way. 

What I really loved about this book though, what it's clearly, unmistakably science fiction. Though the DNA transformation is a little far out (and the "canine" enhanced senses not completely consistent), it is handled well, with some interesting information about parvoviruses thrown in for color.   In a market saturated with wizards and vampires and shape shifters, this is a book about science and about tackling problems with reason, intelligence and knowledge.  That's a very refreshing change. The almost total eclipse of science fiction by fantasy is one of my pet peeves, and  I have often wished  for a really good science fiction series that could capture the imagination of young people the way Harry Potter has.  Something that could really turn kids back toward the excitement of science and the possibilities of the future.    Virals (with sequels obviously in store) is not that book.  But it is a lot of fun, and I look forward to seeing Tory and her friends again.  (And a guest appearance by Aunt Tempe?  Oh boy.)