Memorable animal novels
BY NICK BARNETTCan a novelist get inside the mind of an animal? Is it possible to create an animal character that's believable - as an animal rather than as a human with fur?
It's ages since I read a book whose main character was an animal. But I grew up with such books, as you probably did too. The characters were often just like small-scale, fuzzy humans, usually eccentrical as in The Wind in the Willows and the Paddington stories. I can still remember sitting cross-legged on the mat listening to Miss Ross reading from those books.
The following year, Miss Hartstonge read to us from T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, and these seemed to be more genuinely non-human. But it wasn't a, you know, novel. It rhymed and wasn't hard work, so it couldn't possibly be a novel.
Three books stand out in my memory of the animal-character books I've read:
White Fang, by Jack London. This was set reading in Form 3 English. I liked the snowy adventure and I liked the wolf-dogs, but the humans were detestable. I can remember how hard it was to read about the beatings the people kept giving the dogs, and the slavish way the dogs endured the violence. Until reading that book, I'd had no idea that anyone, anywhere, actually beat dogs. Violence against animals is still one of the hardest things for me to read about. I'd probably avoid a book if I knew that was an aspect of the story.
Watership Down, by Richard Adams. I read this aged about 18, in a borrowed paperback version. The characters were rabbits, and acted like rabbits in many ways. Their enemies were dogs and cars and the things that wild rabbits really would fear. But Adams had built them a culture: they had their own words for certain things - silflay, hraka and hrududu are the ones I remember - and their own mythology. I didn't want the book the end, but it did, gracefully. I'll read it again one day.
Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis. One of the strangest books I've read. In it, dogs are surgically enhanced to be able to walk upright and to speak, and they wear clothes and take on human names. There's ambition, bigotry and a battle. It stretched my credulity into a mile-long filament and wound it around a cotton reel, yet the story was weirdly moving and the talking-dog characters had a dignity.
There's an obvious problem in writing a book about an animal - it's not a human, so doesn't think or act like one in most situations. Yet readers are all human, and so the characters have to be understandable to them. So they have to have names, and we have to hear their thoughts, at least, and their habits and instincts have to be explained to us in ways we'll grasp.
It's a difficult line to keep to for a writer - tell a story for humans yet try to make an imaginative leap into an animal's world - but I always thought Adams did well with Watership Down. He humanised the rabbits in some ways but still took you into a rabbit way of life; he left them as rabbits, albeit imaginatively enhanced, instead of dressing them in waistcoats and putting them in river punts.
Do you have any special memories of other books that had animal characters? Any favourites that you can recommend?
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Not so much the focus of the novel, but Greebo retained his cat qualities when briefly turned human in Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad.
I remember the whole of our primary school, primmers to Form 2, heading off to the movies to see Watership Down. Not really the best movie for little kids.
Books - In the Long Dark by Brian Carter. About feral cats in a seaside village. Parts of it are life-like (as I'd imagine)
I've read a few non-fiction animal books that I've enjoyed. A friend like Henry is a great read. Though you'd have to be interested in children/autism/child development/family dynamics also, because despite the title and the fact that Henry really holds the family together, there is a lot of other themes in there.
Cleo is another good animal-holds-together-family story, set in Wellington so closer to home. Plus, Cleo is a cat and Henry is a dog.
Tell Me Where it Hurts is also fascinating, written by a British vet in the USA, especially if you are at all interested in animal health/veterinary practice.
Those are my recommendations :)
'Faithful Ruslan' is a novel about a dog caught up in the last days of the gulag camps of Russia circa 1950s. He was a camp guard dog and when his camp is closed he is left to fend for himself. Unfortunately, he is unable to be rehabilitated to civilian life and is killed, poor darling.
Pluge Dogs, Richard Adams About 2 dogs who escape from animal reserch center. Dog star, cant remember the author, about an allien come to earth in the body of a dog. Its first experince of being a dog is awaking in a tied sack in fast moving freezing river. Read both books as a teenager and they made me kinda ashamed to be human.
Although I've seen it many many times I still cry everytime I watch White fang the movie!
Black Beauty is often attributed with kickstarting the RSPCA in Britain. I always thought the characters of Ginger and Captain were more interesting than BB as they were incredibly sad and provided a fairly realistic look at the lives of working horses in the late 19th century. Gaspode (another of PTerry's characters) has some fascinating insights about being a dog. I admit I preferred Plague Dogs to Watership Down, probably because I grew up with dogs and found it rather difficult to empathise with rabbits, given their reputation in both NZ and Oz as pests.
i loved and still do the books in the Flicka series, My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead and Green Grass of Wyoming.. it makes me want to live an awesome ranch life in the wilderness of Colorado or somewhere like that.. and i always wanted to be just like Ken with his affinity with his horse Flicka..
The movies however were painful to watch.. the horses looked sedated half the time! (the old ones, not the new flicka movie)
Did anyone else ever read a series of books called The Rats and The Lair (i think). They were the scariest books ever about this two headed albino rat that was like the queen and all the rats below her would eat humans - even if they just got bitten they would die. It was so scary.
I read it as a 10 year old - am still petrified of rats today.
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I loved the Redwall series by Brian Jacques when I was younger. All the heroic characters were mice, otters, hares, squirrels, moles and badgers whereas rats, lizards, wildcats were relegated to villianhood. They were all fairly 'human' though. Squirrels made for particular good archers for some reason... nimble and hiding in trees. Great action/fantasy; I'll probably give it to my own kids to read.