The woes of talking animals and some New Weird solutions

I have a hard-and-fast rule: no talking animals allowed in adult literature, unless it’s Orwell’s Animal Farm or Pierre Boule’s Planet of the Apes. Okay, add to that some of Kafka’s short stories, but that’s it. Seriously, if an anthropomorphic animal crops up in any other book, I’m liable to start groaning loudly before jettisoning it altogether. You could build a house from the number of novels I’ve purchased, started reading and then swiftly abandoned. Half of them have chatty animals in them.

This bête noire first reared its ugly head while reading Michel Houellebecq some years ago. The bad boy of modern French literature, his first novel Whatever (pithily translated from the French Extension du domaine de la lutte) had me hooked until … the anti-hero’s animal fables started popping up. I don’t know what Houellebecq was thinking, but these Aesopian interludes practically ruined the whole story for me of a depressed computer engineer unable to get sex.

Four legs good, two legs bad 

Reading Animal Farm for the first time at school and learning all about allegory and how to pick out the veiled references to Stalinist Russia – now that was a real trip. It got me reading Aesop’s fables and Golding’s Lord of the Flies and re-evaluating those old Loony Tunes cartoons. But as a literary device, the fable swiftly loses its lustre, and so by the time I got to Houellebecq’s animal allegories, all I could do was mutter under my breath, “merde” (admittedly, he did redeem himself with his nihilistic sci-fi tale of cloning in The Possibility of an Island).

It’s for similar reasons that I developed such schizophrenic feelings towards Adrian Tchaikovsky’s award-winning sci-fi novel Children of Time. On the one hand, the descriptive imagination behind the Gilgamesh spaceship had me in awe: its technological deterioration, the intergenerational evolution/ revolution of its human cargo, the endless odyssey in search of a habitable planet … all crisply written and well thought out. In a secondary plot, however, Tchaikovsky decides to construct a whole freaking world out of the Aesopian fable. Every time the story shifted to Kern’s World, where a failed terraforming experiment has given an evolutionary leg up to a population of spiders, I started sighing and losing interest. For all its imaginative power, the spidery storyline just got sillier and sillier; and by the time I
arrived at the climactic chapters, where little spider-astronauts are launching themselves into space and attacking the human-manned spaceship, I could read no more. 

Eight legs good, two legs bad  (Photo: David Mark) 

Personally, I prefer David Wong’s This Book is Full of Spiders any day of the week. But I’m sure fans of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web absolutely adored Tchaikovsky’s planet of intelligent, emotional spiders. That sounds a bit snarky, but it’s an observation rooted in culture and history. Talking animals have always been the mainstay of mythology, folk tales, fairy tales and children’s literature. Three Little Pigs and The Golden Compass and all that. With this sort of baggage, it takes a talented writer like Tchaikovsky to even convince an old cynic like myself to at least try reading an animal parable set in outer space. Perhaps I’ve simply lost touch with my ‘inner child’ – the Id, the source of creative energy – and am thus not as predisposed to hi-tech fairy tales as some. Heck, maybe I’m more in touch with my ‘inner adult’, the conservative, responsible, anal part of your Psyche; the surly professor in your first creative writing class threatening to throttle the first student who writes anything remotely related to talking animals.

The glowing reviews for Children of Time do seem to put me in the minority, as do the praises for Tchaikovsky’s sequel Children of Ruin, with its uplifted octopuses and utopia of humans and spiders living in peaceful harmony. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m more of a hard sci-fi reader rather than an all-embracing devotee of the fantasy genre. Indeed, Tchaikovsky did cut his teeth in fantasy writing; and personally speaking, I can’t abide any dragons that speak in fantasy films while sword fights bore me to tears, unless of course it’s John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981).

Whatever my psychological issues, I had even graver misgivings about The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman. Supposedly it’s a dystopic sci-fi novel aimed at adults; only it’s muddied by too many childish notions that steer it towards the section for young adult fantasy (maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here: never trust a sci-fi book with any form of child or children in its title – except for P.D. James’ 1992 novel Children of Men and the movie of the same name). Similar to Children of Time and its Kern’s World seeded with a gene-editing virus that inadvertently uplifts a superior race of spiders, The Child Garden gives us a semi-tropical London of the future where young humans are raised and educated by a vaguely described virus technology (another pet hate of mine: sci-fi authors who squeeze in miraculous ‘virus technologies’ without any real clue about glycoproteins or RNA and DNA).

Fantasy writing loves a good polar bear  (Photo: Stefan Keller)  

The main protagonist is a musical teenage prodigy who’s resistant to these unexplained pedagogical viruses. But if I was frustrated by the author’s lack of microbiological research, I was completely bamboozled by his protagonist’s lesbian relationship with – wait for it – a genetically engineered opera-singing polar bear. I tried my darndest to plough ahead, suspending my belief beyond all reason. Only I kept being reminded of Kungfu Panda at an LGBT rally. Needless to say, I couldn’t take this novel too seriously and soon abandoned ship. I should mention, though, that it has a heap of adult fans out there and actually won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1990.

The polar bear itself is a popular motif in animal-talking fantasy worlds. Goodreads lists 37 such novels featuring this carnivorous white bear, the vast majority being children’s literature, such as the armoured polar bears of The Golden Compass. But there’s also the adult-oriented Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, about three generations of polar bears who “tell the stories of their lives in this strange and enchanting novel”. I had enough trouble copying out that cloying blurb let alone even thinking about reading such a book. Again, just me. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, on the other hand, has become something of a cult classic – a political satire of modern Soviet life that features an enormous demonic black cat that talks and walks on two legs, thus following in the footsteps of the anti-Stalinist Animal Farm.

For my money though, the true heir to Orwellian postmodernism is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. Not only does his literary device of anthropomorphising the mice (Jews), cats (Germans) and pigs (Poles) afford a strangely different perspective of a horrifying piece of history, but the comic strip form transmutes the silliness of these walking-talking animals while attracting a newer readership to this most essential history lesson. Moreover, just like the frame narrative – which switches between the horrors of Auschwitz and the banal American existence of the protagonist’s father following the war – the graphic form in itself provides a bridge between the unthinkable (the Holocaust) and the ordinary (reading a comic book).

Whatever its true secret, Maus briefly rekindled that long-forgotten wonder I felt upon reading Animal Farm for the first time. But Maus is a special exception to the golden rule of no talking animals in creative writing class. And despite everything, I was still emotionally scarred by that opera-singing lesbian polar bear. Hence, it was with great trepidation that I approached Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Borne, which features nothing less than a gigantic mutant flying bear.

The idea sounds preposterous, but the novel is anything but. Believe me, I started and restarted it on my mini-iPad without being able to commit for a long time, so put out was I by the idea of this colossal bear occupying centre stage. What got me to finally click on ‘continue reading’ were promises of another VanderMeer-esque postapocalyptic province, this time laid waste by biotechnical experiments gone awry. A scenario that goes even further than his superlative sci-fi novel Annihilation. But whereas the sequels within the so-called Southern Reach Trilogy were rather disappointing, Borne is the true successor, taking up from where Annihilation left off. Only this time VanderMeer voyages from an alien environmental disaster zone to the land of the New Weird where the tropes of science fiction and fantasy are turned on their heads.

'Borne' features a gigantic flying bear - oh yeah

The giant flying bear known as Mord rules over a town devastated by the “Company”. The few human survivors must eke out an existence amongst ruins inhabited by mutants and hybrid creatures; the aborted biotech experiments of the Company, including Mord himself and his proxies: regular-sized transgenic bears who lust for blood and who view Mord as their god (stay with me here). Key to the narrative is the novel’s namesake, Borne, which is supposed to be neither human, nor animal, nor plant, but which inadvertently evokes memories of that giant talking carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors. In any event, Borne starts out as this small hybrid squid-cum-sea-anemone before growing into an enormous protean creature that can turn itself into just about anything. Naturally, there’s a final showdown between the two titans of Mord and Borne, and a perilous journey to the wreckage of the Company where our human protagonists learn the secrets behind the biotech horrors unleashed upon their town; all of it described in lush, postapocalyptic detail.

Borne is considered emblematic of the New Weird, a literary genre that’s a bit tricky to pin down. In the introduction to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The New Weird, it’s described as “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts … traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy.”

With his wife, Ann, Jeff VanderMeer also edited The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (he’s a busy man) and it’s probably from this big book chock full of talking animals whence sprung inspiration for Borne and Mord. But where Ryman’s opera-singing polar bear fails, VanderMeer succeeds with his giant transgenic bear and its fanged proxies. Most likely because 1) Mord never actually speaks despite his über-intelligence and aerial abilities 2) the apocalyptic setting of bioengineered mutation and failed experimentation lends the story scientific credence in the vein of The Island of Doctor Moreau and 3) like Spiegelman’s Maus, the complexity and baroque violence of the New Weird transcends anthropomorphic animals and fairy tales to depict a hideous new reality. It doesn’t hurt either that VanderMeer’s writing knocks it out of the park on just about every page.

Another exponent of the New Weird is China Miéville. Like VanderMeer’s Borne, Miéville’s novels cannot be neatly slotted into one specific sci-fi or fantasy subgenre. For writers like Miéville, every story is an exercise in destroying a genre’s traditional conventions, breaking down boundaries and messing with stereotypes. This is why a giant spider with the hands of a human baby and which likes to spout poetry while travelling between dimensions works quite well within Miéville’s convoluted Bas-Lag series, whereas the spidery planet in Children of Time trips over itself in its emotional earnestness. David Wong’s sci-fi/ horror-comedies probably fall somewhere between the New Weird and bizarro fiction, although Wong is usually less interested in fantasy and more into sci-fi and cosmic fart jokes.

But if I can chuckle over a David Wong novel and accept the fantastical contortions of VanderMeer or Miéville, then perhaps I haven’t completely lost touch with my inner child. I’m not sure I could read something like Lord of the Rings again, but I did enjoy watching Game of Thrones as much as the next person. The dragons didn’t bother me either and I even developed a soft spot for that undead ice dragon in Season 7. But I swear, if those dragons ever started speaking I would have groaned so loudly before turning off that show for good.

© Tony McGowan