THE BEDSIDE BOOK OF BEASTS

A review of Graeme Gibson's The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany from this Sunday's NYT Book Review:

December 6, 2009

Wild Things By JENNIFER B. McDONALD

Quick: How would you react were you to cross paths with a lion in the Kalahari? Would you run away? Play dead? Or would you be “too dazzled to do anything” and freeze, boggle-eyed, right on the spot? According to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, whose work Graeme Gibson excerpts in THE BEDSIDE BOOK OF BEASTS: A Wildlife Miscellany (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $35), the appropriate reaction is to “walk purposefully away at an oblique angle without exciting the lion”; or, hope that the lion, too, would rather avoid a skirmish and will muster the decency to saunter off himself.

Such silent understanding between predator and prey belongs to an innate “wild self-sufficiency,” a quality, Gibson observes, that centuries of civilization have bred out of domesticated beasts — the human animal among them. This disconnect is a major motif of his nimbly curated bestiary. So is the idea that as much as we have divorced ourselves from the natural world, we cannot escape that we are of it. “We harbor a primordial animal memory in our being,” Gibson writes. “Its shadows dwell in our instincts, just as they stir in our dreams and fears.”

As he did four years ago in “The Bedside Book of Birds,” Gibson, the Canadian novelist (and longtime partner in birding and berry-picking to Margaret Atwood), has compiled poetry and myth, fairy tale and folklore, sacred texts and travelogues in an enchantingly illustrated volume that will awaken something primal in any human who dips into its pages. But this is far from a merely pretty survey of the animal kingdom. It is a book of raw spirit, a polemic against cold industrialization buttressed by Darwin, Forster, Murakami and Neruda, Audubon, Rubens and Leonardo, among many others.

The phrase “Book of Beasts” has a ring of fancy to it, and Gibson does include the fantastical, like Hesiod on “fierce Echidna,” half nymph and half snake, “eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth.” The Taittiriya Upanishad declares, “O wonderful! O wonderful! / I am food! I am food! I am food!” while Kafka spins a cat-and-mouse fable. But mostly we encounter the corporeal: there’s George Orwell felling an elephant (“His mouth was wide open — I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat”) and Tolstoy in a close scrape with a bear (“I realized that he was drawing my whole face into his mouth”). Gibson himself recalls “the only time I thought I might conceivably be eaten,” by what may or may not have been a shark: “It was an unpleasant feeling.” Alongside these entries appears a pageant of art spanning cultures and centuries — paintings, drawings, woodcuts, tribal masks; foxes howling, panthers crouching, a lioness embracing a boy, even as she sinks her teeth into his pliant neck.

The scariest parts, though, come less from tales of sharp fangs and ferocious claws, and much more from the disquieting message, stalking the reader throughout, about a delicate balance disturbed. The dark presence of man is felt most keenly in the section “Killing Without Eating,” where Atwood writes of predators who slaughter recklessly, “angry old men / sneaking around in camouflage gear / pretending no one can see them.” These are not true hunters, she says. “They have none of the patience of hunters, / none of the remorse.”

Thankfully, Gibson favors awe over stuffy moralizing, leaving it to the muscular words and images of his miscellany to reveal human evolution as a beautiful and a terrible thing: it has given us the poetry gathered here, even as it threatens to make the subjects of this poetry familiar to future generations only as pictures in a book.